“The Things That Have Been Broken”: Grete Weil’s Short Stories and Autobiographical Novels As Acts of Mourning Jeffrey Green Submitted to the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program Gratz College Philadelphia, Pennsylvania In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies June 27, 2015 “The Things That Have Been Broken”: Grete Weil’s Short Stories and Autobiographical Novels As Acts of Mourning Jeffrey Green [It is]the central literary problem of our time – namely, in the face of immense suffering experienced at the hands of systematic, mechanized, and largely featureless forces acting upon largely nameless victims, what can literature do to depict, explain, evoke, or understand such suffering? Filkins, Peter. "Vertigo." September 23, 2014. Accessed April 2015. https://sebald.wordpress.com/. --Peter Filkins Introduction Mourning is German-Jewish novelist Grete Weil’s aesthetic, moral, and intellectual project. My intent in this thesis is to explicate and defend that claim. Weil’s two major autobiographical novels, Meine Schwester Antigone (My Sister Antigone) and Der Brautpreis (The Bride Price) deal with complex issues of guilt, Jewish identity, and irreparable loss; Weil is concerned to mourn these losses through texts that explore and ask questions of them. I will also examine Weil’s collection of short stories, Spätfolgen (Aftershocks), published in 1992, to show that mourning remained a consistent preoccupation as Weil continued her late-life writing. Meine Schwester Antigone and Der Brautpreis appeared in German in 1984 and 1988, respectively, and looked backward. The Aftershocks stories are set in the contemporary now of the early 1990s and work through ways that the Holocaust pervades the lives of survivors and second-generation Jews without regard to proximity to the event.  Weil mourns Europe, the Jewish graveyard. She mourns her husband, Edgar (Waiki), a playwright murdered at Mauthausen, her fraught relationship with Jewish identity, the children thrown violently into the backs of Nazi death trucks in Amsterdam, the German language, her dog, her hijacked country, the Kulturnation and its classical, humanist traditions of intellect and art. She grieves that she was forced to confront her Jewishness by the Third Reich when her life as a fully secular and assimilated Berliner had been lovely. She grieves her old age and incapacitation, ugly streets, and the pain of no longer being able to look forward to a new Gide or Mann that she must read the moment it comes out. She mourns her unstructured days that are shot through with brutal memories that are not just recollections, but the stuff of her life, the ground of her consciousness and identity. “Weil implicitly and explicitly poses questions that explore the difficulties of her own case history. What does it mean for a person to insist on national identity after fleeing that country and being pursued in exile? What do the terms ‘Jew’ and ‘Jewish’ signify to a woman with no belief in the God of the Old Testament and no stake in the success of a post-Holocaust Jewish nation, yet whose husband was murdered because he was Jewish?” Mattson, Michelle. Mapping Morality in Postwar German Women's Fiction: Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Drewitz, and Grete Weil. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. 143. Grete Weil’s work of mourning, which has its roots in what Kaufmann calls “the traumatic origins of the present,” makes her a writer in the spirit of Tisha b’Av. David Kaufmann, "Angels Visit the Scene of Disgrace: Melancholy and Trauma from Sebald to Benjamin and Back," Cultural Critique 70 (September 22, 2008): 94-119. Perhaps all major Jewish writers whose work flows from the Shoah work in the spirit of Tisha b’Av; if so, Weil is not the least of them. She marks what happened, and she mourns it by inscribing her experience so that it does not float off, so that it acquires the weight necessary to remain available for re-thinking, re-examination, re-collection. Lamentation is Weil’s subject – lamentation of what is lost, of the rupture, of “the things that have been broken.” The Dream Before: For Walter Benjamin. Laurie Anderson. Warner Bros. Records, 1989, MP3. This thesis seeks to limn the ways in which three of Weil’s most important works are acts of mourning. Weil mourns and deeply values memory, but she understands that memory cannot repair the past, which is why she writes stories – to understand and mourn that which now resides only in memory. Neither she nor Benjamin’s angel can go back and fix the things that have been broken. Weil captures trauma in language, but it is not made more manageable. That which is mourned will forever be a wound. Weil’s writing makes the catastrophe articulate and difficult to ignore, which is a moral imperative in itself. No one can read Weil and not infer that hers is a melancholic perspective founded in mourning. Her return, again and again, to motifs of aging, unstable identity, and the problem of continuing to live (with ghosts) mark hers out as a mind shaped by the melancholy that emerges from mourning a ruined world. Serious, literary autobiography emerging from the Holocaust — and Weil is an autobiographer — responds to two questions involving testimony and reflection: What happened? i.e., how does the writer perceive what happened? And how does the writer interpret what happened? Perception answers what? and interpretation responds to What does it mean? Neither rises to the level of history unless the autobiography’s author is a professional historian who brings the scholar’s evidential and interpretive standards to bear on autobiography. Rather, autobiography arises from the individual writer’s experience and attempt to make sense of it. The narrators in Weil’s two autobiographical novels and the Aftershocks stories are not necessarily Weil herself, but a voice that is all-but-Weil, a device that offers space for storytelling that is both drawn from and imagined through personal experience that has been thoroughly plumbed. Her narrators are Weil’s double, although the narrators are not contingent on Weil, the writer. That is, that which the narrators relate does not depend on Weil’s experience or witnessing. Doubling makes no difference to the vitality and originality of the story in the work it undertakes as art. Exception: three of the Aftershocks stories use a third-person narrator Weil is not a documentarian. She would contend that all of her books are creatively imagined because she approaches the material with the mind of the novelist engaged in exploring difficult material via literature in which the question, not the answer, is privileged. She struggles to find herself in her own text, to test meanings and the possibility of no meaning.  Memory and self cohabit the body. Perhaps it is because of her comparatively advanced age when she wrote, but Weil mourns both somatically and emotionally. She betrays how she feels physically, e.g., what it feels like to be an elderly German woman looking out over Munich on a random morning. She mourns her dead contemporaries; she mourns that she survived the Shoah in occupied Amsterdam by random good fortune. There are several characteristics that accrue to all the works considered in this study. They are all connected with Jewish identity, loss, guilt, and the presence of the past in the present. All Weil’s texts are characterized by a tension between repression of Jewish identity and affirmation of it and of the history which goes with it, tension between anger towards the perpetrators and the guilty feelings of someone who survived, who did not actively resist, who returned to Germany after 1945 to live on in relative affluence, and yet who never escapes, as many of her narrators recognize, the trauma of loss.” Moray McGowan, "Myth, Memory, Testimony, Jewishness in Grete Weil's Meine Schwester Antigone," in European Memories of the Second World War (n.p.: Berghahn Books, 1999), 151. As a narrative device in the two novels, Weil mourns Sophocles’ Antigone, as well as Michal, David’s wife in the Hebrew Bible. She grieves herself in and through both women with whom she shares certain ethical and situational continuities and discontinuities that are different in each case. In the two novels and the collection of short stories, Grete Weil writes herself into history by inscribing her mourning upon it via her art and inviting readers to think through what is mourned and why, as well as the moral significance (and possibility) of mourning history itself. There are ancillary questions that bear on coming to terms with these works. These include the problems of the Jewish return to Germany; German’s Nazi taint; Jewish identity; and the possibility of thinking about Holocaust trauma and severe clinical depression as phenomenologically, though not qualitatively, similar in certain respects. Matthew Ratcliffe writes about the phenomenology of depression, describes the experience articulated by both Holocaust survivors and clinically depressed patients of “wobbling out” of a shared reality and into an alien and isolated world which they understand to have undergone a rupture such that they are stranded, insuperably cut off from others. Matthew Ratcliffe, “The World of Depression,” in Experiences of Depression: a Study in Phenomenology, International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 16.  Grete Weil wrote about the complexities and messiness of moral choice under extreme conditions. A young woman who came into adulthood during the Weimar Republic, Weil met and married Edgar in 1932, and, like so many of their kind in Germany -- cosmopolitan, brilliant, and assimilated -- they fled Munich in 1933 to seek safety in Amsterdam. Waiki was murdered at Mauthausen in 1941. Weil survived the Holocaust in hiding and, after some time in displaced-persons camps, returned to Germany, a decision for which she took much criticism and generated even more incredulity, as did most Jews who made the discretionary decision to live again in Germany. Both Weil and Waiki were devoted to German culture; in leaving Germany, they left a state gone mad, one they no longer recognized. They were Germans; they felt German, thought in German, and their intellectual lives were carried on in German and Germany.   That which is not breakable does not embody the good as does the inherently fragile: an orchid, a baby, Michelangelo’s David, a sapling. Without care, these things’ fragility will likely be their undoing. Their existence is contingent on people making good ethical choices to recognize and protect their vulnerability. The body’s vulnerability, its capacity to be injured, to experience pain, to be killed, was radically exploited by the Nazi regime to an extent and on an unprecedented scale. So fierce was the assault on the fragile good that those touched by it often reported experiencing a rupture with the reality they were accustomed to sharing. It is in this regard, the experience of the body and of pain, that Weil writes about most articulately but that is yet to be identified in the literature. I address this in the present study. Her two works of life-writing, My Sister Antigone and The Bride Price, are both autobiographical, but only in the sense that she explores the possible meaning that may be mined in her experience of the Holocaust in Amsterdam. Certainly, she is telling her story, but her method gives the sense that she is thinking through that story to ask what she has been asking since her late 30s: what might that experience mean? It is an effort to interpret experience rather than simply recount it. Weil’s is a novelistic reflection and exploration of the phenomenology of life in extremis viewed by a woman from this side of the disaster. Throughout, “. . . her post-Shoah perspective prevails: she seeks access to Jewish history from the point of view of a survivor of Nazism, a modern woman, and a feminist.” Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, Keepers of the Motherland: German Texts by Jewish Women Writers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 278. Weil’s unabashed feminism is unexpected given the context, but there is no doubt, she “ascribes agency or a sense of control to her female characters, manifest also in their sexual desires and aggressions. These qualities are portrayed as factors that enhance a woman’s ability to survive.” Lorenz, 279. I will proceed by taking up three major issues: mourning, Jewish identity, and Weil’s decision to return to Germany after the war. I then move on to textual analyses of Der Brautpreis, Meine Schweste Antigone, and the stories in Spätfolgen. Hereafter, I will refer to these works by their names as translated by John Barrett: My Sister Antigone, The Bride Price, and Aftershocks., In this paper, I will, from this point, consistently refer to Grete Weil and her efforts in her works in the present tense. I choose this because it denotes that Weil, as is the case with any writer worthy of serious critical attention, is present in the work. It also makes tense consistency and is less confusing. I will use the past tense when referring to events in Weil’s life and matters that would feel forced were they treated in the contemporary-now. Mourning It is my argument that Grete Weil’s two autobiographical novels are acts of mourning; the stories in the Aftershocks collection resonate with mourning, although they cannot be directly mapped to Weil’s personally suffered grief. I want to clarify what this claim means in light of Leader’s diffentiation between grief and mourning. “Grief is our reaction to a loss, but mourning is how we process this grief.” Darian Leader, The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression (n.p.: Hamish Hamilton, 2008), 39, iBook. In Weil’s case, she processes the grief continuously and iteratively; yet, it is, for her, a loss that cannot be worked such that a reconciled, on-going life narrative birthed. “Each memory and expectation linked to the person we have lost must be revived and met with the judgment that they are gone away . . . Each time we think of them, some of the intensity of our feelings is being fractioned away." Leader, 40. Except that, in Weil’s case, the intensity does not diminish, the wound remains open. A text is an act of mourning to the extent it marks, meditates on, or ruminates about irreparable loss in a sustained way such that it is reasonable to infer that the writer is struggling to make sense of the loss, struggle with its reality, even reconcile herself to or make peace with the loss, no matter the project’s dim prospects. Formulated somewhat differently, a text is an act of mourning to the extent it marks “the things that have been broken” that neither Benjamin’s angel of history nor any human agency can repair, restore, or recover and that may be understood as being integral to an ongoing effort of feeling one’s way through a devastating grief. Discovery of peace or closure is not the point; it is the iterative, non-linear labor of trying to live in and work through the pain that is crucial to the process that mourning denotes. Mourning is a work in progress; for Weil, there is ample evidence that the text becomes her intervention in the introspective passage toward a confrontation with the utter irreversibility of profound loss, the process of struggling to comprehend it and its gone-forever-and-ever-ness. In My Sister Antigone, the trace that betrays Weil’s continuous transit through mourning is her writing about Waiki’s death and her feelings of guilt about it that pervade the novel. Not only does she commit to the page his arrest, deportation, and murder, but she continuously brings her narrative around to “my wound.” She mourns Waiki on virtually every page of My Sister Antigone. If it is not explicitly present at a particular moment, it lies just behind the narrative surface as a palimpsest. All other losses – her country, her language, her home, the deported Dutch Jews, even her dog – orbit around the central loss of Waiki and all that his death implies. The stories in the Aftershocks collection cannot be said to be acts of mourning in the same sense as My Sister Antigone and The Bride Price. But they resonate with the work of mourning. As I will discuss later in detail, each of the stories deals with a loss that can be mapped back to Weil’s own experience, although none of the losses are as personal for her as those explored in the novels. Weil was deeply German and identified profoundly with the German intellectual and cultural tradition; the first of the stories concerns a man she knew when she was much younger but who now, living in New York, represses both his German and Jewish identities in favor of a bland American existence. She writes the story to mark what is lost in this embarrassed dual repression. Weil, too, had to mask her identity, eventually to the point of going into full-time hiding. But her suppression of any hint of breathing while being Jewish was to stay alive. Weil also writes in the stories about a Jewish-German woman who dies in a German hospital because she will not let German doctors touch her following an accident. Weil, too, feared the Nazis, but she was not paranoid. In yet another story, a young Jewish girl drowns in the Seine after a protagonist leaves her in supposedly safe hands. The Jewish woman who trusted the girl’s Gentile caretaker feels that she betrayed the little girl, that she did not do everything she could to ensure her safety. Weil felt the same way about Waiki. Another story: An older gentleman ends his life rather than live on without his soulmate-spouse, whom the Nazis murdered. Weil toyed with suicide; she knows the temptation to end consciousness given the pain of a ruined world. She grieves her protagonist’s death, accomplished as it is on the Southern Italian coast amidst memories of time spent there with his late wife. In the collection’s last story, more an accomplished novella than short story, Weil grieves the long history of genocidal hatred. All these threads of grieving emerge from and can be tracked back to her life. They may or may not be considered acts of mourning, but they certainly are cries of grief that recall the more intimate mourning of the novels. One of the most remarkable and shattering texts of mourning in My Sister Antigone, begins at the end of chapter 11 and picks up in chapter 15; they are temporally and spatially separated, but form a single text. In chapter 11, N, the narrator, writes a long, rambling letter to her dead mother, at times sentimental, at others sarcastic and critical. "Dear Mother, Now that you are dead, I can write to you.” Grete Weil, My Sister, My Antigone, trans. John Barrett (New York: Avon Books (Mm), 1984), 120. As she is bringing that letter to a close, the thought of another letter she urgently wants to write overtakes her. “And then hastily, frantically, as though I were afraid my strength would fail me, another letter: ‘Dear Friedel, . . .’” She is writing to the dead, first to her mother, and now to Friedel, who perished in Poland in 1945. Although N remembers Friedel as “an intellectual and a man of the theater . . . a pacifist and a leftist. . . .”, he nevertheless wound up as a German soldier who belonged to a unit assigned to clear the ghetto in Piotrkow, Poland. “‘Not long ago your brother was sorting out old letters and came upon your manuscript. . . .Typed on wartime paper, yellowed and crumbling.” Weil, Antigone, 122. Friedel’s manuscript is chapter 15. It is a narrative of horror, a careful mapping of vast atrocity. At twenty-seven pages, it is fair to ask after the justification for including the letter in the novel. It is to mourn. It is the author mourning; it is an invitation to the reader to mourn. I read the text; it goes on and on. Atrocity and outrage are piled atop atrocity and outrage. There is the image of N sitting alone, at night, reading, once again, this text. It is an image of one human mourning what happened, looking at a great crime in a way that only a text makes possible: the eye passes over the words no faster than a reader chooses. The words slip by once, twice. The eye goes back, rereads; the reader closes her eyes, rethinks, remembers, rereads, then, goes on. This is the work of mourning, of looking at What Happened and feeling its monstrosity and its silent cry of distress from the page, which is all the more maddening for its playing the inert messenger. This is Friedel’s voice: Three meters away from me lies a tall, slender, black-haired girl on her stomach, one side of her face turned toward me. A policeman is bending over her. He shoots three times in rapid succession into her head. The head jerks up a bit each time, but the face remains perfectly tranquil . . . Blood oozes out of her hair as if someone were wringing out a sponge filled with a light, oily liquid. Then a cascade of blood suddenly bursts from her nose. To think that so much blood can spurt out of the nostrils at once.” Ibid., 171. A reader passes over this text, cringes, is changed, but life goes on. The mourner, on the other hand, pauses, re-reads, insists that she confront what is on the page, thinks hard about what confrontation and engagement with this image means. It is the labor of mourning. The account would have been didactic coming from N, so Weil recruits her dead friend, Friedel, to share the manuscript he sent his brother. There is no preaching, moralizing, instruction. The specificity and brutality of the crime, documented and recounted in minute detail, do the work of confronting a reader with the Real Thing. It is up to each reader to choose what, if anything, to do next. When she is ready to read the document (again), N waits until night, then she “quietly takes Friedel’s manuscript . . . from the bedside table, turn[s] on the reading lamp, and sit[s] down in the little leather chair. I read the report once more, . . ." Ibid., 151.  Jewish Identity The same woman who in the 1920s became an active Zionist in response to escalating anti-Semitism Ibid., 146-147. writes in The Bride Price that she found it difficult to believe the Nazis actually meant her when they condemned Jews. “Strange: even during the persecution I did not have the feeling that they could mean me. Each time I left the house I had to make it clear to myself again: I look Jewish, my (forged) identification card is not good enough so that they’ll accept it. If I go out into the street, they’ll stop me and send me to the east.” Grete Weil, The Bride Price: a Novel, trans. John Barrett (Boston: David R Godine, 1992), 143-144. She was such a good German, she reasoned, surely they could not be hunting her. She loved Göethe and Schiller and Mann. Where were her “Jewish” crimes? She did not feel guilty of being Jewish, descent be damned. Or, as Gay puts it, “. . . by 1933 we had greater worries. We had suddenly become Jews.” Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing up in Nazi Berlin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 47. It must be noted early in this discussion that the way that Weil weighed her self-identification as a Jew and as a German leaves her writing about the subject open to interrogation. So serious was her orientation to being German that it must be asked whether she effectively rejected herself as a Jew. Immediately, my response must be a strenuous no, although the matter’s gravity is such that Améry’s claim about Jewish self-rejection must be engaged, even if to dismiss its implications for Weil. In a discussion emerging from thoughts about three things 1.) the international community’s abandonment of the Jews; 2.) his interpretation of the global consensus about Jews’ supposed repugnance; and, 3.) two kinds of Jewish capitulation that are common in light of that condemnation, Améry writes about “the classical Jewish self-hatred of those German Jews of the time before the outbreak of Nazism.” Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 87. These Jews’ aspirations were self-betraying, Améry argues: “The self-haters had believed that they were unable to be what they so much wanted to be: Germans, and therefore they rejected themselves.” Améry, 87. This must not be construed as a suggestion that Weil suffered from self-hatred. However, it cannot but be noted that Weil repeatedly insists that Jewishness is alien to her, that her identity is sunk deeply into a foundation of German-ness. This is how Weil formulated what was, for her, the relationship between Germany and Jewishness: “I have not been raised in the Jewish tradition. My parents always believed in the German-Jewish symbiosis, as did most everybody at that time. And I always identified with German culture – with Goethe and Schiller.” Lorenz, 279. She refers to herself as, “A woman who cannot jump over the shadow of her own origins, who rejects herself and flails about. A distraught woman, who does not draw the proper conclusions.” Weil, Antigone, 36. At another point in Antigone, Weil writes about her confusion over how to relate to the Dutch Jews whose photographs she took in Amsterdam. I meet a stratum of Jewish society I never encountered before: the petty bourgeoisie and proletariat, types Rembrandt painted, very Oriental, alien, suspicious toward outsiders, proud, tragic clowns, difficult to handle, and hard to take for me, who am not one of them, who am one of them, an assimilated Jew without religious ties who shares their fate . . . Ibid., 74. Troubling here is not so much the class issues and their sadness and comedy, but the way Weil describes certain categories of Jews who are unfamiliar to her, and, in some respects, repellent – to her. The language is so rough as to echo that of people who do not wish Jews well: difficult, suspicious of outsiders, oriental, . . . Additional thinking about these texts may provoke more insight into the nature of Weil’s sympathy for and distance from Jews and Jewishness, not the least of which is the nature of the difference between wanting to be German and privileging the German component of a Jewish-German dyad without unwittingly prejudicing the self’s Semitic dimension. For now, it is necessary to articulate as best as possible Weil’s relationship with Jewishness. Weil thought of herself as a German from the time of her earliest memories. She and her family were thoroughly assimilated. She speaks of her “relationship to Judaism, lukewarm and lax, without clear contours. At home you never ask where a person comes from or what he is. You belong to the Jewish community but do not go to the synagogue. I submit to religious instruction as a necessary evil. Learn Hebrew prayers by rote; they do not cast light on any of the questions that preoccupy me. The holidays we celebrate are Christmas and Easter, not Hanukkah and Passover. Ibid., 146. Gay simply does not remember why these Jewish religious expressions remained in his secular family. His parents kept a few Yiddish words in their discourse, practiced circumcision, and lit candles for parents’ death anniversaries. “A touch of surviving Jewish loyalties or an expression of private, secular piety? I do not know; we never talked about it. But in any event, these gestures did not define my parents. They were Germans. True, my father did put his name in an address book of Jewish merchants in Berlin in the late 1920s. But that was business.” Gay, 54. From Weil’s perspective, “Jew” was a label the world, i.e., the Reich, attached to her without regard to whether it defined the person on the inside, i.e., in her intellectual and emotional lives and in her sense of self-identity. There was no such correlation for Weil or her family. Her perceptions while growing up were akin to Gay’s. “The idea of attachment to a social community or a common heritage, then, was virtually meaningless to my parents. Jewish awareness? Jewish identity? These were empty slogans to them – and hence to me. The thought that Judaism could be anything more than a religion entered their minds only glancingly.” Gay, 49. The expanding Reich forced many assimilated, secular Jews like Weil into a distressing confrontation with their Jewish identities or lack thereof, which for many were out of sight and out of mind or subsidiary to other ways they understood themselves. These were not necessarily self-hating Jews; they did not necessarily wish themselves not to be Jewish. But the category “Jew” held no particular relevance for them. For others, being Jewish was an accepted fact, and no more was made of it. For Jewishness to suddenly be forced on people as the only important aspect of their specificity was a distressing and often enraging shock. Weil saw four ways to be Jewish: 1.) a belief in the God of Israel; 2.) strong identification with the Jewish state (after there was one); 3.) descent; and 4.) as a member of a historical community of suffering. Mattson, "Grete Weil, a Jewish Author?"116-117. She has to concede descent, as does any Jew; the only other way she can relate is as a suffering-community member. By the time she published The Bride Price, she had become an assenting Jew because she wrote herself into Jewish history, as it were, by embodying the character of Michal. Mattson, 116. This woman who is, not unlike Améry, a protesting Jew when My Sister Antigone was published in 1980 meets three of her four possible criteria for being a Jew less than a decade later. Weil’s relationship with her Jewishness was always fraught; identity as a Jew often seems like something she grudgingly concedes, which can seem like a hostility to her Semitic roots. So strongly privileging her German identity suggests a get-out-of-jail-free card: Weil can almost be heard to say, “I’m such a thorough-going philo-German that my Jewishness is irrelevant. Go find a real Jew – someone who understands herself to be a Jew.” This must be carefully parsed because of the possibility for misunderstanding. Weil is trying to explicate her surprise that she is the Nazis’ intended target. It is not that she wants to mask her Semitism with philo-Germanism, but that her Semitism is, in fact, virtually non-existent given her congenital philo-Germanic sensibilities. The fact remains that Weil did not, in the 1940s, self-identify as Jewish and would live out her 93 years struggling with the tension between her German and Jewish selves. Weil does little to help stabilize an understanding of her identity. Within two consecutive pages of The Bride Price is found this seemingly remarkable contradiction. Weil writes, “Since my Jewish identity is so weak without belief in God or the feeling of a homeland in Israel, I think about what ties me to that which is Jewish and to Michal.” Weil, The Bride Price, 144. On the very next page, Weil writes, “At the same time, my consciousness of bearing responsibility for all Jews is very strong. If I behave badly, all Jews behave badly. It was always that way and presumably it will never be otherwise.” Ibid., 144 The objection must be that one who feels that she bears “responsibility for all Jews” must find such a weight grossly onerous given that her “Jewish identity is so weak . . .” These claims are troubling as it strains credulity that a weak Jewish identity could support a responsibility for “all Jews.” What seems contradictory, though, is Weil’s effort to convey the complex reality of her identity, especially given how uncomfortable she feels about it. She is struggling to be honest. This issue can be brought to greater clarity by mapping Weil’s experience to that of Améry, who wrote, in that well-known argument in At the Mind’s Limits, that it was impossible for him to be a Jew, and, yet, it was impossible not to be one in the face of the Nazis. “Since I was not a Jew, I am not one; and since I am not one, I won’t be able to become one. . . No one can become what he cannot find in his memories. . . . Thus I am not permitted to be a Jew. But since all the same I must be one and since this compulsion excludes the possibilities that might allow me to be something other than a Jew, can I not find myself at all?” Améry, 84 Not unlike Weil, Améry was raised as a secular, and, as Weil puts it, he brought nothing to the category of being Jewish. He was not raised religious, although the holidays his family celebrated tended to be those of the Christian calendar. “I see myself as a boy at Christmas, plodding through a snow-covered village to midnight mass; I don’t see myself in a synagogue. I hear my mother appealing to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph when a minor household misfortune occurred; I hear no adjuration of the Lord in Hebrew.” Améry, 83. But Améry knew that he was a Jew; it simply did not substantively define him. It was “a description he accepted without regarding it as definitional. It was one part of his mixed inheritance, though not one he regarded as an adequate description.” C. W. E. Bigsby, Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 261. “I was a Jew, just as one of my schoolmates was the son of a bankrupt innkeeper.” Améry, 83. After the Nuremberg Laws were promulgated in 1935, Améry became a Jew because the laws decreed him to be one. This moved the process of identity formation out of his hands and placed it under the Nazis’ control. Améry was furious. “To be who one is by becoming the person one should be and wants to be: for me this dialectical process of self-realization is obstructed.” Ibid., 84. As Bigby has it, “The dilemma for Améry was that he had become something he had never believed himself to be in anything but a technical sense.” Bigsby, 261. Edmond Jabès had the same experience. “But the fact of suddenly having to live a condition, the condition of being Jewish, changed things for me. I was faced with new problems, and this led to a completely new kind of questioning for me. In some sense this was the origin of the series of books that followed.” Paul Auster, The Art of Hunger (New York: Penguin, 1997), 146. A “series of books” flowed from the catastrophe of both Améry’s and Weil’s experience, too. That Which Happened became the point of departure for all of both writers’ subsequent work. His freedom-to hijacked, Améry made a choice that Weil may have considered antigonal: living in Vienna, he read the Nuremberg Laws, understood the gravity of his Jewish identity, and opted for them to be “personally binding.” Magdalena Zolkos, On Jean Améry: Philosophy of Catastrophe (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011), 106. Thus it was that he could not be a Jew and he found it imperative to be a Jew. While Améry and Weil share the experience of having their Jewishness forced on them by the Reich, Améry made a decision that Weil shows no indication of having considered: being Jewish – he opted, as an ethical choice to engage his Jewish identity in solidarity with the powerless and persecuted. Weil may not agree that she failed to step up to a moral obligation to stand with the Jews of Europe in the same way she writes that she failed to say no to the Nazis. These are not the same things. She wanted to say no, after Antigone’s no, but she did not choose to say no as a Jew. She would likely have argued that if she were to resist, she would resist as a human, not as a Jew. Weil’s Return to Germany Grete Weil returned to Germany in 1947, although she made a brief unauthorized visit earlier. There never was any doubt in her mind that she would go back despite the population still holding overwhelmingly anti-Semitic views. David Bankier, "The Jews in Plans for Postwar Germany," Jewish Political Studies Review 14, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 58. Weil mourned what she regarded as having been taken from her when she fled to Holland, not the least of which were “her profound sense of Germanness, her connection to the German language and culture, and the (Southern) German landscape.” Pascale R. Bos, German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust: Grete Weil, Ruth Klüger, and the Politics of Address (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 21. Gay recalls how profound was the effect of returning to Germany with his family after the war. It “. . . gave my life an ineradicable undertone of mourning.” Gay, 22. To place Weil’s decision to return into perspective, consider the choices that Moshe Landau made when faced with the same knowledge about Germany as Weil. Landau was a German jurist who sat as the presiding judge at the Adolf Eichmann trial. Landau broke all ties with Germany, even to the point of foregoing his native German language. His was a “total disengagement from his birthplace and his roots—a personal separation as well as a linguistic one.” He did not share the comforting differentiation that many made between Germans and Nazis. He refused to meet with Germans, in particular those from Danzig, and rejected the German financial reparations to which he was entitled. He refused to speak German, even with his mother, who lived with him and his wife and their three daughters. Michel Shaked, “The Unknown Eichmann Trial: The Story of the Judge,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 29, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 6. Weil never broaches the issue of her feelings about living among people who may well have been (and almost certainly were) Nazi sympathizers or party members. She does not betray anger at the Nazis’ malevolent appropriation of the German language, which is not to say she did not feel such animus. However, it is noteworthy that Hans, a character who Weil draws unsympathetically in her short story, “Guernica,” which I discuss later, foregoes speaking German, like Landau, and Weil’s first-person narrator, possibly her double, is appalled by this sign of Hans’ rejection of his German identity. Opprobrium accrued to returning Jews, much of it coming from Zionist organizations and Jews who could not imagine calling the land of the murderers home; they felt betrayed by those who repatriated. When the World Jewish Congress held its initial gathering in 1948 at Montreux, Switzerland, its political commission passed a resolution holding that the Jewish people would never again live “on the bloodstained soil of Germany. Michael Brenner, After the Holocaust (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 66. What to make of Weil’s decision? “Again and again I am asked why I went back to Germany,” she writes. “It’s my country, where my language is spoken.” Corn, Alfred. "Bathsheba and the Nazis." The New York Times. May 09, 1992. Accessed April 26, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/10/books/bathsheba-and-the-nazis.html She repeats her explanation, which is difficult to fault, but neither is it satisfying: I’m a German. But Germans can live in places besides Germany. Thomas Mann managed it. I would be grateful had Weil been more forthcoming, more expansive, about the Germany decision. But she is not: “Whether I like it or not – and very often I do not like it – I am a German. Bos, 21. Weil knew, of course, that much of urban Germany was devastated. Given the cataclysm just passed, a city of rubble seemed appropriate. “For as she saw it, the mood in Germany befit her own. After having briefly visited Sweden and Switzerland immediately after the war, she realized that she could not feel at home there, as people had little awareness of the immense suffering caused by the Nazis.” Ibid., 21. Weil writes that there was an alignment between the wasteland she felt inside and the one she saw from the street. “The ruins? They suited me. Not only the German cities had been ruined by war, I had been, too. . . I couldn’t have returned in ’45 to an intact country, it would have made me furious.” Ibid., 21. She needed to be in a space that had been physically wiped out, just as her world had been; it felt right that there was a congruence. “I walk through the ruins and feel they belong there; when a world has been destroyed, no buildings should remain unscathed.” Weil, Antigone, 76. As Lappin observes, “. . . there are consequences when a Jew chooses to live in post-Holocaust Germany.” Elena Lappin, ed., Jewish Voices, German Words: Growing up Jewish in Postwar Germany and Austria, trans. Krishna Winston (North Haven, CT: Catbird Press, 1994), 7. Going anywhere but Germany after the war would seem a straightforward matter for exiled German Jews, and, for most, it was: do not go back; abandon that land of murderers to their blackest guilt. Do not remotely suggest forgiveness or normalization. But it was not that simple for many, and it was into the complexity of German Jews’ return to Germany that Grete Weil located herself. The variables and uncertainties ranged from the future of Jewry in post-war Europe to Jews having lost everything and emerging from the camps with no money, no jobs, and no property because it had been confiscated. The Germans who lived or did business in that property when the war ended were not pleased to see the former owners return. Then there was the appeal of Zionism and the prospect of a new Jewish state, but there were also immigration quotas and concerns that the classical German tradition not be lost to the Jewish intelligentsia. At a more fundamental level, basic survival was a challenge in ruined cities. The majority of Jews regarded Germany as the land of the murderers; the serious consideration of returning could render one a persona non grata within the Jewish community. Those who, like Weil, wasted no time returning came in for vigorous criticism. It may have been easier for Weil as she was not a joiner: she did not belong to any community, was not interested in joining Gruppe 47 or forming alliances with other writers and intellectuals. Neither building new political parties nor advocating a political agenda were for Weil. She called herself “a bleeding-heart liberal” who wanted only to get back to life as a writer in a social-democratic state. But she did not see a role for herself in the building of that state. Although her discussion of her choice-making is sparse, Weil appears to have followed her heart and head and returned to Germany to reclaim for herself that which she regarded as hers, even if it was to live amidst the shells of buildings. Jews like Weil caught the wrath of Zionist and other Jewish organizations, some of which voted to exclude Jewish Germans who permanently resettled in Germany. Other groups recognized that some Jews had a legitimate reason for wanting to stay back. Many Jews were willing to endure the moral stigma because of their age and reluctance to abandon a business or family and start over in an unfamiliar country by learning a new language. Weil returned and left concerns about blame and betrayal to others. The Germany to which Weil returned was deeply anti-Semitic and bent on repressing any engagement with what had happened. “Rather than working through their emotional commitments to Nazism, they fled from them and refused to accept and move beyond their complicity in the crimes of the fascist era.” Kaufmann, 105. Germans wanted to think neither of genocide nor of the physical destruction of their country. W.G. Sebald writes of “the astonishing capacity for self-anesthetization of a community that had come out of a war of annihilation without having undergone any psychic damage to speak of.” W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, Modern ed. (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 12. Weil chose to live among these anguished and repressed people. She and her family were their victims, and now she felt it impossible to live anywhere but in their midst and harbor dreams about sharing common ground with them. Germans’ emotional repression meant that publishers were not interested in manuscripts about the Holocaust or the war. It would be decades, which is the main reason Weil did not publish the works for which she is known until she reached her 70s. “[C]ritics, readers, and publishers [resisted] literary works about Jewish persecution. From the late 1940s into the 1960s, there was a large cohort of Germans born in the 1920s and 1930s who could not begin to think about Jewish persecution because of what they thought of as their own victimization by the Nazis.” Bos, 37. Ironically, Germans were about not mourning; Weil was all about mourning. Anti-Semitism ran deep in post-war Germany. The Allies’ postwar planners foresaw that Nazi-era anti-Semitism would continue to be substantial after Hitler was gone.” Anti-Semitism had been deeply inscribed by the Nazis and hatred sometimes flared when Jews began returning. Bankier, 58. Planners agreed that too many Jews restored to positions or appointed to new or existing positions could be destabilizing. “For example, that the return of German exiled journalists, most of whom were Jews, to their former place of employment should only be permitted in special and isolated cases, and this because there was a manifest danger of allowing Jews to be active in this field.” Bankier, 64. A fair question that is beyond the scope of this paper is whether this supposed caution in the interest of social stability was itself anti-Semitic. Weil, through her narrator in Antigone, explains that despite what must have been a toxic environment for many Jews, she never felt threatened by Germans after the war. She describes Germans as shopping with “grim determination,” and she observes they did not dress with “élan” even well after the war. More serious is her characterization of Germans’ affect. “[A]s each of them pushes his way along, he is surrounded by an aura of solitude, coldness, aloofness, aggression.” Weil, Antigone, 103. Weil found something else back home in Germany: a German language assaulted by distinctly Nazi practices regarding vocabulary, syntax, idioms, acceptable phrases, and euphemisms. Weil made much of how essential it was for her to get back to the place where hers was the lingua franca – she consistently pairs her longing for Germany with the German language; she regards both as her homes. But that language was the German that Celan said had to “go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech.” Paul Celan, Collected Prose: Paul Celan, trans. Rosemary Waldrop (New York: Routledge, 2003), 34. It is puzzling that Weil never writes about her encounter with Nazified German and that nothing about that encounter appears in the secondary literature in English. In what follows, I offer a few notes about the state of the language in the Germany to which Weil returned. These notes draw on that landmark work about Nazi philology, Klemperer’s Language of the Third Reich. Victor Klemperer, Language of the Third Reich, trans. Martin Brady (London: Athlone Press, 2000). The Nazis’ collision with language is a vast subject that has been treated exhaustively. See, e.g., Yahil, Leni. “Sprachregelung.” In Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, edited by Israel Gutman, 1398-1399. New York: MacMillan, 1990; Pegelow, Thomas. “Linguistic Violence: Language, Power and Separation in the Fate of Germans of Jewish Ancestry, 1928-1948.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, 2004; Young, John Wesley. Totalitarian Language: Orwell’s Newspeak and its Nazi and Communist Antecedents. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991; Friedlander, Henry. “The Manipulation of Language.” In The Holocaust: Ideology, Bureaucracy, and Genocide, edited by Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton, 103-113. Millwood, NY: Kraus International, 1980; Bosmajian, Haig A. The Language of Oppression. Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1974; et al. My purpose here is merely to limn the issue to the extent necessary to contextualize the linguistic environment Weil found when she set up housekeeping in Darmstadt. Hitler “heard inside his native tongue the latent hysteria, the confusion, the quality of hypnotic trance . . .” Bigsby, 4-5. Bigsby quotes George Steiner with regard to German having been vulnerable to the expression of Nazi propaganda and to the articulation of Nazi ideology. “The German language was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism. It is not merely that a Hitler, a Goebbels, and a Himmler happened to speak German. Nazism found in the language precisely what it needed to give voice to its savagery. Ibid., 4-5. It was the grammatical and syntactical structure of German – the capacity to assemble new words and combine elements of the existing lexicon to formulate a Nazi German, complete with accepted and conventional (and demanded) phrases and vocabulary that marked the speaker or writer as having internalized or was surrendered to the Nazi ethos. For a serious writer, the integrity of language could not be more important. Weil had to live with and write against a German that had been appropriated for propaganda purposes. “The most powerful Nazi propaganda tools were single words, idioms, and sentence structures that came to permeate ‘the flesh and blood of the people . . . through . . . a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously.’” Klemperer, 15. Klemperer argues that these structures “lodged themselves so deep below the surface that they appear to be becoming a permanent feature of the German language.” Ibid., 14. Klemperer suggests that the Nazis achieved their linguistic legacy in much the same way that a person is slowly killed by poison. “Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.” Ibid., 16. It cannot but intrigue a reader of Weil, who reveals so much of her inner life in the novels but remains largely silent about her re-entry to life in post-war Germany, what she made of returning to a homeland whose cities were ruined, whose people were deeply anti-Semitic and unprepared to confront their Nazi legacy, and whose language suffered from having been contorted by Nazism. Yet this was where she wanted to live and write even though she had the resources to go elsewhere. There is little in Weil’s translated writing or in the literature in English that suggests what Weil thought about, much less was distressed by, her fellow post-war Germans. She lived alone, mostly isolated from the world. She wrote her books, did freelance writing and translation, and generally lived a quiet life until her death not far from Munich at the age of 93 in 1999. The Bride Price Grete, the protagonist of The Bride Price, is an elderly woman writing from the position of a sophisticated, savvy, thinking person saddled with the burdens of a failing body, but with the strength of a robust long-term memory and a penchant for dogging difficult questions even when they implicate her. The Bride Price offers a hybrid of autobiography and fiction, although fiction is the privileged genre: there are almost double the number of chapters devoted to the novel’s re-narrated ancient text compared to those in which Grete, her story’s narrator, works through, among other things, her difficulty with Jewish identity, especially the challenge it presents for understanding herself as a German, the identity in which she is at home. For Grete, “Jewish” and “German” are mutually exclusive categories, a perspective that, widely shared, would doom any aspiration to a German-Jewish symbiosis. This Jewish identification problem, which figures most prominently in The Bride Price, is not an issue that occurs only in her later years; she was distressed from the beginning when she was forced by Nazism’s ascendancy to confront her Jewishness. Even then, in Amsterdam, when she was in her late 20s to mid-30s, Weil was upset by the gulf she felt between herself and the Jews she interacted with as a member of the Jewish Council. Weil attempts to find a way to engage herself with Jewishness through the biblical figures of Michal and David. Lorenz, 281. Their inter-text interacts with Grete’s narration of her own story in 14 chapters that feature Michal as the narrator and seven narrated by Grete. The two narratives call out to each other as the novel proceeds, e.g., Grete’s flight to Holland, David’s flight from Saul; Grete’s mourning Waiki, Michal’s mourning Palti, and, later, David; Weil’s mourning men and their weapons; Michal’s mourning a culture of war-making and lethal heroism; and Weil’s trying to connect with a Jewish identity to which she cannot bring any content of her own; and Michal’s trying to find a way to engage with David whose violent ethos she rejects. Both the Michal and Antigone inter-texts can also be thought of as responses to the narratological problems that inhere in writing about the Holocaust. Looking directly at the thing is blinding; it becomes lost in the glare. But, by looking through a lens or to the side or with special glasses, the thing itself becomes visible. The inter-text is such a lens. Weil does not begin her task as a textual scholar of the Bible, so she puts minimal energy into researching Michal from the Biblical text other than knowing her story in Samuel I and II and Chronicles I. For the rest, she uses, “[h]er own impressive powers of sympathy and imagination." Corn Weil wildly elaborates Michal’s history, even to the point of blasphemy as she condemns Jahwe as a fiction that men use to justify all manner of violence. “Who kept me from becoming what I was, a rebel who revolts against religion, against the compulsion to explain every misdeed that one perpetrates with the words: Jahwe has willed it. No one has said it more often than David. Empty words: Jahwe has willed it. To wage wars, kill people, plunge them into misery. Jahwe has willed it. This frightful God.” Weil, The Bride Price, 12-13. Elsewhere, Michal is unrelenting in her critique of militarism. “We were used to wars. There was always a war. The Amalekites, the Ammonites, and, most often, the Philistines attacked us. Or we them, it was hard to tell exactly which.” Ibid., 18. Michal speaks this lament later in her years as she looks back over a life that she regards as largely a ruin punctuated by fighting, the Israelites always acting in accord with the will of Jahwe. “Time after time, Michal watches as men justify their destructive, warring behavior with reference to God’s will.” Ibid., 18. If this rejection of the patriarchy and its essentially violent, assaultive values from Jahwe on down, ontologically speaking, is the most startling aspect of Michal’s/Weil’s performance, then Michal’s most important narratological task is to push “away from the author’s own story to explore Jewish tradition in cultural, existential, and personal terms.” Lorenz, 281. It will become clear in my discussion of My Sister Antigone that the persona of the myth, Antigone, is of the utmost personal importance to Weil; there is a genuine intimacy – “my princess” Weil, Antigone 51. – that Weil feels for her, virtually a dependence. Michal, on the other hand, is constructed as being “out there” relative to Weil; she helps Weil achieve some healthy distancing from her struggle with Jewish identity, which is the issue that most distresses Weil after the unhealable wound of Waiki’s death and the catastrophe of survival. Michal embodies “wisdom, humanity, and powerlessness” while David is her opposite, a man “corrupted by desire, power, and greed.” Lorenz, 282. The novel “emerges as testimony less of the events of the author’s life than of the difficulties of maintaining a dual [German and Jewish] and problematic sense of self in the face of world destruction.” Miriam Fuchs, The Text Is Myself: Women's Life Writing and Catastrophe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 141. It is by approaching the classical David, who is familiar to Weil from her humanistic German education, via Michal that Grete hopes to gain access to a Jewish identity that makes sense to her, but the project is flawed from the beginning because she must consider both the classical David and the David of the Hebrew Bible. In fact, Lorenz argues that one way to read the novel is as Weil’s struggle to reconcile the classical and heroic David of Michelangelo with the “more realistic” one of Rembrandt. Lorenz 281. That project is doomed, though, because Grete’s “fascination was not with the man who is considered to have united the Jewish kingdoms and founded the city of Jerusalem, but with a prime example of Renaissance sculpture in Greco-Roman style.” Susanne Baackmann, "Configurations of Myth, Memory, and Mourning in Grete Weil's Meine Schwester Antigone," The German Quarterly 73, no. 3 (Summer, 2000): 114. The classical David makes music and sings (calming Saul), and he is handsome, strong, and blessed with charisma. The Biblical David is, among other things, a militarist, wife-deserter, and exemplar of divinely endorsed patriarchy. He gathers the disparate Jewish kingdoms into a single Israel, but that achievement comes at a high cost. Weil’s Michal discloses that David tried to take her by force at least twice, that he shows little evidence of love, and his primary interest in bedding Michal is to have a male child. As a feminist, Weil is aghast at the biblical text’s patriarchy, so she reconfigures it via re-narration. Lorenz argues that reading David as homosexual or bisexual (his relationship with Michal’s brother, Jonathan, is clearly homoerotic) undercuts patriarchy and makes way for Weil’s access to the classical David that symbolizes Weil’s humanist legacy. Early in the novel, David and Jonathan are reunited and amply demonstrate their pleasure. It is Michal speaking: [David] “leaps up, embraces Jonathan. They kiss a long time, I stand to the side, helpless, angry. Has my brother brought me along to demonstrate his strange love to me?” Weil, The Bride Price, 16. Lorenz reads this narrative turn as Weil’s symbolic subversion of biblical patriarchy. “By revealing these and other possible facets of the David myth, Weil offsets the patriarchal ideology of the biblical text and configures a framework that she finds easier to accept.” Lorenz, 281. It is an interesting argument, but Lorenz fails to persuade me that Grete could look past David’s violence merely because he is identified as being bisexual and therefore more approachable. Symbolically subverting the biblical patriarchy by creating an alternative narrative does nothing to alter David’s mythical identity as a hero who calls on his battlefield prowess for legitimacy. If Weil is to find some peace with her Jewishness through David, it must be through the biblical David, not a David she constructs. Closure on Jewish identity cannot flow from access gained by a fiction beyond the ancient one. Even the novel’s title is rooted in violence: King Saul, Michal’s father, promised her to David on the condition that David bring Saul 100 Philistine foreskins. This is the bride price. David, being an alpha-male over-achiever, returns with double that number of severed penises as he unquestioningly pays more than Saul’s price. Michal is so shocked and revolted that she can never give herself to David sexually, which brings to a pre-marital end any intimate relationship that might have evolved after the marriage, which Michal proceeded with despite her disgust. Michal continues a love/hate relationship with David for the rest of her life – he is compelling at the level of masculinity, creativity, and cleverness, but his capacities for ruthless ambition and violence are repugnant. Here I want to introduce the notion of condemnatory attachment into my exploration of Weil’s Michal. When David calls for her after years of absence, she leaves Palti, a rather drab but kind man she resignedly married with David’s blessing, to live in David’s court proximate to his other wives, Maacha, Abigail, and Bathsheba. Once again, David tries to force himself on her and is rebuffed whereupon he leaves her to her isolation. From the time before she married David to her years growing old in David’s court, it is always from within David’s gravitational influence that Michal stringently critiques and largely rejects David to whom she is nonetheless attached in problematic ways. Her discourse is feminist: she condemns militarism, force, ambition, violence, and traditionally constructed heroism. But, Michal demonstrates a self-destructive condemnatory attachment that alienates her from the object of her would-be love as well as from herself and deprives her of a life with Palti, a simple and gentle man who genuinely loves her. The Michal who condemns David is the Michal who remains statically attached to him; her thinking about her relationship to David does not evolve over time. She cannot give herself to him sexually, but she cannot (or chooses not to) leave his court, making of herself a bystander and her life one of self-consolation by endlessly retelling her story to herself. On the other hand, Michal’s cultural and social contexts severely limit her choices. She could return to Palti, but that is not what she wants. However much Michal’s choices are circumscribed, there is nevertheless an element of her consent to remain available to David, if not for intimacy, then for consolation or attempted reconciliation, or even counsel. While she criticizes the patriarchy, she is stymied in making choices that challenge it, or, at the very least, allow her to absent herself from its constituency. I want to take this one step further and argue that, for both Michal and Grete, the ontology of their contexts renders them without the agency to diagnose their stagnation and formulate a different way of being. If Michal is blinded by dominant social structures, Grete is blinded by the ontology of her trauma. It would be outrageous to argue that a survivor like Grete fails in being able to identify the source of her stuck-ness, i.e., the murder in Mauthausen of her husband and the guilt of survival, and then proceed through a period of contingency into a different life-solution. That may well imply normalization, “moving on,” which would betray Waiki and too facilely solve the problem of how to go on. It is unclear what a desire for normalization or a determination to work around the emotional roadblock of Holocaust trauma would mean in ethical terms. Both categories are deeply problematic. At the same time, though, it is important to keep in mind the enormous cost to Grete of not being able to do either of those things. Both Grete and Michal are sealed into their fates. They therefore suffer, together. Both sides of David that Michal condemns and is attached to – the poet David and the warrior-hero David – are evident at multiple moments in the text. One of them is his taking Jerusalem to be the capitol of a united Israel by killing the Jebusites who live there. In one breath, David speaks to Michal as he poetically imagines “his” city: “Do you not see it, the pale-yellow city, sparkling in the glow of the setting sun? My city, from which no one will ever cast me out, the city of David, . . .” That romantic vision came at the cost of genocide: “And the dream became reality. He conquered the fortress with cunning. They told of a spring that gave rise to a small stream, in whose bed David and his men, Joab in the lead, had clambered up to overwhelm the unsuspecting Jebusites.” Weil, The Bride Price, 92-93. Michal cannot move toward David, but neither can she abandon him. Michal’s disgust with David only grows deeper, so deep that she may not have been surprised at a remarkable claim that Lorenz makes: “ . . . [I]n the context of Weil’s novel, the much-debated Sonderweg leading to Nazism, rather than beginning in nineteenth-century Germany, started among Jews at the time of David.” Lorenz, 284. Michal knows that David is, in fact, an exterminationist: “When ready to relocate the capitol of a united Israel in Jerusalem, he overtakes the city and murders everyone. These are a people that David says are ‘hostile to us, live there, but,’ as he insists [in tortured syntax], ‘on what their claim to it is based is not known to me. It can be taken from them; even if it will not be easy.’” Fuchs, 157, Weil, The Bride Price, 92. The Jebusites are far from the only group that the Hebrew Bible documents as having been exterminated by the Israelites. Deuteronomy 20:16,17 is just one of more than 100 passages in the Hebrew Bible that deal with the killing of humans; Burggraeve, Roger, and M. Vervenne. Swords Into Plowshares: Theological Reflections On Peace. Louvain: Peeters Press, 1991. 109. this text offers what seems on casual reading and without the benefit of historical context and exegetical scholarship to be counsel about conducting genocide: 16 How be it the cities of these people, that the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth 17 but thou shalt utterly destroy them: the Hittite, and the Amorite, the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee; "Deuteronomy Chapter 20." Deuteronomy 20 / Hebrew. Accessed May 08, 2015. http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0520.htm - 16. Neither Michal nor Weil would have patience with scholarship that seemed to explain away what on its face appears as divine sanction for mass murder. The values that Grete finds in passages like this render it out of the question that David could serve as a path into Jewish identity for her. So she turns to Michal, a woman without power who lives out most of her life with Palti, who possessed neither distinction nor wealth, or on the fringes of David’s court. Weil’s “main agenda [in The Bride Price] is inscribing Biblical tradition with a perspective that allows her to position herself into this tradition as an emancipated modern Jewish woman.” Lorenz, 283. Grete is concerned, in other words, to write herself into Jewish history, no small task given her conflicted feelings about her Jewishness, but it is her desire to accomplish this inscription that betrays Weil’s Jewishness by assent. Mattson taps Lang for this concept of Jewishness by assent and descent, with assent meaning an assertion of one’s Jewishness that emerges organically from within one’s own experience, and descent denoting an acceptance of one’s inherited Jewish legacy. A problematic relationship with one’s Jewish identity does not render impossible an assent to one’s Jewishness, but it presents significant difficulties. An assertion of her Jewishness by assent was not possible for Weil until The Bride Price. Mattson, “A Jewish Author?” 116. Mattson’s claim is complicated, though, by Weil’s own words in chapter 14 where her voice cannot be distinguished from Grete’s. Asked once what “Jewish identity” means, Grete remembers that she replied that she did not know. Later, she decided that “belief is necessary for Jewish identity, the belief in Jahwe, the God invented by the Jews and passed on to two world religions.” She has a second criterion. “[A] bond with the Land of Israel, the feeling of a homeland in Eretz Israel, the land of our fathers.” Then comes her conclusion on the matter. “Neither the one nor the other is present in me, never was present, hence I never had a Jewish identity. What remains is that I have experienced, as a Jew, what suffering means.” Weil, The Bride Price, 127. Here is the assent: “. . . I have experienced, as a Jew, . . .” Weil claims that, to the extent she understands herself to be a Jew, it is as a member of a community of suffering (Leidensgemeinschaft). Mattson, Michelle. "Grete Weil, a Jewish Author?"117. But being a member of this community still does not constitute, for her, a Jewish identity. Grete then complicates matters with this question: “Have I become more Jewish since I’ve been involved with David and Michal? Yes, surely, something has started that was not there before.” So now, she says, she has become “more Jewish,” but still does not concede a Jewish identity. Only a few lines later, she writes: “Jewish roots, naturally.” In chapter 16, recalling a conversation with her dog, Shagi, she says, “Your human is a Jew, and that means an extra measure of sorrow.” And, a moment later, “That I am happy so little has to do with my being Jewish. I drag too much horror around with me.” This is consistent with the community-of-suffering definition, but these bits and pieces of text make it difficult to neglect altogether the possibility that Weil developed at least some sense of Jewishness. When these texts are considered as a whole, though, I will suggest that Weil can be said to have had an understanding of herself as Jewish, but she self-identifies as German, not as Jewish. Except for suffering, Weil’s connection with Jewry is cerebral, an acknowledgement of a fact. Besides a fraught relationship with Jewish identity, Grete brings a number of needs to this story: a “craving for affection” and the loss of her companions, including her much-cherished little dog. Also culturally problematic for Michal is her feminism: “. . . I have the hope, no, even more, the conviction that the day will come, the beautiful, bright day, when women will be admitted to the council to restrain the men from all too rash actions for which they can no longer make amends, from playing with weapons, with danger. The day when women will no longer be merchandise in the markets, when everyone, men and women, will harken to the song of life, and understand.” Weil, The Bride Price, 92. Weil’s feminist perspective is so transparent in Michal here that it often seems affected to continue pretending there is a distinction. But there is: Grete is not Weil; that is what the writer contends, and a rebuttable presumption should exist for writers that they mean what they say. That the biographies of the character and the writer are similar does not mean that a double is a 3-D-printed version of the author; it is impossible to know from a text how they may differ in their thoughts, joys, and worldview. Besides, Grete transparently departs on numerous occasions from Weil’s experience. In Grete’s chapter 14, she describes a scene on the Auschwitz selection platform. She cannot see a small child, she says, “without remembering with almost physical pain the mothers who, on the ramp of Auschwitz or some other camp, had their children torn from their arms and smashed against a wall or shot in front of their eyes.” Ibid., 124. Grete does not claim she saw the atrocities, although, it is true, it is possible to infer from the phrase, “or some other camp,” that Grete is speaking of selection-ramp atrocities in general. But the words, “remembering with almost physical pain . . .”, suggest that Grete did witness the selection-platform horror. Weil was not a witness, but she wants to place her Grete in that position so as to intensify the point Weil is driving toward, i.e., that Grete saw so much that she is still unable to process it all, to make meaning of it without breaking down. Spending years in hiding is bad enough; but, for this narrative moment, Weil needs an eyewitness, although Weil gives plenty of indication that she can no more work through the atrocities than can Grete. In that sense, there is an overlapping here of Grete and Weil. The more time goes by, the greater the distance from it, the harder it is to comprehend all that. Despite all or just because of it I go on thinking it through, not avoiding it, and am convinced, for the most part, that I have experienced all the horrors so often, so intensively, that nothing can rob me any longer of my laboriously acquired equanimity.” [Grete pauses, reflects, and recognizes she is not being forthcoming.] “But then it happens to me anyway, I’m sitting in front of the television set and crying my eyes out. Weil, The Bride Price, 124-125. If one of the most intriguing aspects of My Sister Antigone is the personal relationship that the narrator has with Antigone, one of the most important jobs of the Michal/David story is to get some distance from the author’s personal story. It seems odd that a woman who understands herself as German and is not fond of complicating her identity as a German with an overlapping identity as a Jew would choose a story from the Hebrew Bible about a Jewish woman, Michal, to help come to terms with her own Jewishness. Fuchs, 141. Yet, it is no stranger than this same woman who, in My Sister Antigone, chooses the protagonist of a Greek myth to help her come to terms with her choices about having worked for the Amsterdam Jewish Council, the guilt of survival, and the grief she felt at having done less than everything she could to save her husband. Both Antigone’s and Michal’s complicated choices demonstrate how messy the world can be, how challenging a place this life is to make good decisions about high-stakes ethical problems that, at the time, defy comprehension in their implications for the lives of the actor and those to whom she is ethically related. To reprise its essential conflict to make a comparison, Sophocles’ Antigone presents a human actor confronting a choice that, quite literally, seems impossible. Both options available — privileging the city’s well being, as articulated by Creon, or enacting a sibling’s obligation to honor a fallen brother, as Antigone is so strongly called to do — can be supported as strong ethical cases. Similarly, Michal must choose between David the poet, singer, hero, and David the hero-warrior, David the power-motivated king, and David the invoker of Jahwe who makes the use of violence seem inevitable. In choice-making circumstances such as Antigone’s and Michal's – which are genuine binaries and not false dilemmas – any choice radically defines the actor because it articulates the values she chooses to defend when a choice absolutely must be made, despite the price it will extract on the choice maker, while signaling that, for her, the other ethical good is inferior — from her perspective. The question now occurs as to whether The Bride Price is, in fact, a novel in more than name. If so, the question recurs about why Weil chooses the novel and complex, indirect autobiographical intertexts like Michal and Antigone rather than straight-ahead autobiography. Fuchs cuts through the difficulty regarding genres by arguing that, indeed, the dominant form in The Bride Price is fiction, and, much more importantly, it is successful in representing the biographical and historical complexity precisely because it is a novel. Fuchs shares this position with Nussbaum regarding the capacity of literature to work through extra-literary problems, which should be taken to imply that literature is not necessarily an end in itself. Nussbaum is concerned with seeing, for example, Canetti’s Auto-Da-Fe as a novel about renowned sinologist Peter Kein and understanding it as a work of art complete unto itself and that does not point (or need to point) toward anything but itself. Canetti, Elias. Auto-da-fé. New York: Continuum, 1982. However, holding that thought in mind, Nussbaum can agree with David Foster Wallace that literature is about “what it’s like to be a fucking human being.” Sundermann, Eric. "Q&A: D.T. Max on Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story, David Foster Wallace's Influence, and Undertaking the Biography of an Author of a Generation." The Village Voice. September 05, 2012. Accessed May 10, 2015. http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-09-05. If that is true, then stories cannot but raise the possibilities of the novel’s complexities and refractions to think through difficult questions, not as a point of departure for tame book-club discussions, but as a crucible through which soundings may find in the deep structures of a text resonances that can bring difficult ethical questions to clarity. The Antigone and Michal intertexts do this for Weil, who thinks about her unhealing wound through Michal’s irreparable psychical injury and about the choices she made about Waiki and working for the Jewish Council through the Antigone myth. Similarly, Nussbaum is interested in doing moral philosophy through Greek tragedy and Henry James, for example, and argues that a literary text can offer a powerful mode of access to thinking about ethical problems precisely because it is literary. “Literary form is not separable from philosophical content, but is, itself, a part of content – an integral part, then, of the search for and the statement of the truth.” Nussbaum, Martha Craven. "Introduction: Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature." In Love's Knowledge: Essays On Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. 3-4. Thus Nussbaum would be sympathetic with Fuchs, in her discussion of H.D.’s The Gift, to articulate how literature enables thinking when readers are grappling with biography and history. “Examining poetry and fiction . . . [it becomes clear how] biography and history, emerging through ‘subterranean’ devices such as displacement, allusions, transference, allegory, and formal structures are ‘reinscribed, translated, radically rethought and fundamentally worked over.” Fuchs, 87. In other words, pulling an auto-biographical narrative through another story gives a multi-dimensional kind of access to both the problem and to the text that attempts to wrestle with it. In my discussion of My Sister Antigone, I will show how Weil intertwines her own and Antigone’s narrative threads. Here, though, she keeps the threads separate. Grete’s narrative never mentions Michal’s and vice versa; they stand alone while calling out to each other. It is readers’ decision about how the two texts interact. In Antigone, Weil explains how Waiki was arrested, but she does not mention it in The Bride Price as she subordinates those autobiographical elements to articulate her reasons for returning to Germany after the war. Corn nicely captures how the Michal narrative and the memoir interact in this regard: “The memoir, counterpointed with the story of Michal’s compromised relationship to David, doesn’t so much justify that decision as guide us along some of the emotional paths that led to it.” Corn (Corn) My argument throughout is that Grete Weil writes as an act of mourning. In The Bride Price, she particularly mourns violence and the cultural and theological structures that support, justify, and valorize it. When she mourns David’s passing at the novel’s end, she mourns what she and David did not have – a life together, which could have been possible even given the culture’s polygamous practices. The alternative was Michal’s in-house exile, her exclusion from the daily life of the court with him. This is a life of mourning because its stasis continuously reminds Michal of what she has lost. She cannot but mourn David’s pursuit of power that ruined any hope of a conjugal union. The fragile and vulnerable are broken in a culture that valorizes power. It is those broken things, the ones that Paul Klee’s angel cannot go back and fix, that Michal, Grete, and Weil mourn. I write this in full knowledge of the debate over whether Klee meant his Angelus Novus to point toward Hitler. My position privileges the way that Benjamin thought about the Angelus Novus, which is a philosophical construct that does not touch the art-historical question of the angel’s possible referent. My Sister My Antigone My Sister Antigone is about the moral implications of using “the only freedom that cannot be taken from you: the power to say no.” Weil, Antigone 118. Grete Weil’s narrator, nameless but hereafter known as N, is a Holocaust survivor whose biography and sensibilities track Weil’s. As in The Bride Price, N is Weil’s double, not entirely not her, but enough her for the book to be, along with The Bride Price, creative life-writing that Weil calls a novel she set in the late 1970s when West Germany was experiencing violent political turmoil from the left. A preliminary issue of the narrator’s identity must be addressed before moving forward. Rather than understanding the narrator as Weil’s double, Bos contends that the narrator is Ismene, Antigone’s sister who lacked Antigone’s stomach for a fight. Ismene did not take a stand in favor of loyalty to Polyneices, leaving Antigone alone against Creon’s power. I beg to differ with Bos’ interpretation, which finds evidence for Ismene as the narrator in the novel’s title. “It is not the narrator who speaks of Antigone, but it is Antigone’s sister Ismene who narrates.” Bos argues that “[t]he narrator is in Ismene’s position, and resembles her, more so than Antigone.” Ismene is played down as a figure, Bos contends, while in Sophocles “she is a colorful and important character.” Bos 52. Bos seems to want it both ways, i.e., Ismene narrates, and the narrator more closely resembles the narrator than Antigone. One or the other must narrate. The sisterliness lies between N, who is Weil’s double, and Antigone. If Weil’s double is not the narrator, then the disparities of ethical courage would accrue to Ismene, not to Weil’s double; the purpose of the double is for Weil to explore her admiring relationship with Antigone as well as to interrogate herself about the choices she made that did not live up to Antigone’s example, at least in N’s eyes. That interrogation cannot effectively take place if the narrator is so far displaced from Weil herself – while Weil could look “across” at the Ismene-Antigone relationship and think through the problem at one remove, it is much more difficult and less intimate and damning (from Weil’s perspective) compared to keeping the narrator close by. Beyond this, Ismene’s only crime was not to stand with Antigone. That is a one-dimensional tension. If the narrator is Weil’s double, the challenge presented by Antigone’s choice applies to a range of moral decisions that N, and thus Weil, looks back on as problematic at least and damning at worst. After suggesting Ismene is the narrator, Bos adjusts her claim to be that the narrator has much in common with Ismene in that neither was able to make the ostensibly ideal ethical choices as Antigone. The choice Antigone made cost her everything; Ismene and N were not prepared to pay that price, although N paid for her choices the rest of her life. It is easy to lose sight that there is only one human making any choices – N – to the extent her choices reflect Weil’s, which is a reasonable assumption. I turn now to a detailed consideration of the novel. More intensely than any of her other works, My Sister Antigone is a work of mourning. I used the term lamentation earlier to describe Weil’s work, and this novel is indeed a lamentation, one about Weil’s irremediable choices during the war that, in her words, make her, if not exactly a criminal, certainly not an innocent nor a heroine. “Ich bin nicht, nicht naiv, bin keine Heldin.” Baackmann, 280. I want to hover over this notion of guilt because it is so central to My Sister Antigone. There are multiple sources of guilt that Weil explores, but the main source is Waiki’s death. That she survived him, that she was not arrested with him in Amsterdam in 1941 and did not die with him, that she did not do everything she possibly could to get him released while there was still time, that she does not know how he was killed or where he is buried – all of these swirl in a black vortex of guilt that forever haunts N. “Not knowing how he died becomes her ‘wound,’ epitomizing her desperate engagement with the past. This past coalesces into a narrative, or rather brings together many narrative fragments under the shadow and sign of the legend of Antigone.” Baackmann, 270. The crisis posed by the Nazis activated the myth for Weil. “What I do know is that for a long while I simply accepted her fate, as if it were self-explanatory, a grim story, no more. I felt no particular affinity for her. . . . Not until I was brutally jerked out of my own princess-like existence, brought face to face with murder and annihilation, did the figure of Antigone undergo a change for me, . . .” Weil, Antigone, 13-14. For N, the guilt in question is that of having survived as well as guilt about specific acts or choices she made during the war. The main force fields in the novel are the tensions created by the moral rigor that Antigone achieves in her choice about how to respond to Creon, N’s envy of Antigone’s single-mindedness, and her grief that she was unable to match Antigone’s ethical behavior by actively resisting the Nazis in a manner not unlike Antigone resisted Creon. “Recalling her forced and temporary collaboration with the Nazi regime – she worked for the Amsterdam Jewish Council as a photographer – the narrator asks herself why she had not used this chance to sabotage the system more effectively. “Why did I not kill the SS captain during that great raid in June ’43, when six thousand were hauled off at one time? I was wearing the armband of the Jewish Council, could move about freely, had only to go by him and pull the trigger.” Weil, My Sister Antigone, 69. Why did she not help rescue more of the doomed children and adults?” Baackmann, 280. It is here that N confesses that she is no criminal, but neither is she a heroine. Complicating matters is that Baackmann is not quite right: Weil was not forced to work for the Jewish Council. It was a choice that she had to be persuaded to make. Weil, Antigone, 83-84. I wrote earlier that Weil, like every Jew, experienced the Shoah emotionally as well as somatically. The body is so crucial to My Sister Antigone that I want to pause on this theme. Weil’s wound, the locus of her grief, is a starting point for thinking about how prominently Weil privileges the experience of the body in My Sister Antigone. Most obvious are her comments about aging, its humiliations, frustrations and constraints. She sees it as a process of yet additional losses. But she writes about bodies beyond her own, about the Catastrophe understood through the body. There is Waiki’s body – it is arrested, taken away, probably tortured, and killed. Her dog’s body. It, too, dies, although there is no body to be found, no way to know how he died, not unlike Waiki. There is another aspect of Weil’s/N’s body: the one that had to be hidden in a crawl space behind a friend’s bookcases. It was her body the Nazis were looking for. What Happened started with Jews’ bodies – alive, deported, held in camps, starved, tortured, raped, experimented with, and murdered, cremated, or buried in mass graves. Before it was experienced any other way, the Catastrophe was experienced as an assault on the body. It was what was done to the six million Jewish bodies as bodies, that precedes thought about what happened to Jewish bodies – any context, representation, theological reflection, history, or literature. Weil foregrounds this somatic experience. There are the bodies of Dutch Jews registering with the Amsterdam Jewish Council for which Weil worked as a photographer. She did not recognize herself as having any connection to them because of the nature of their embodiedness – she did not recognize her body, Jewish though it was, in their bodies, Jewish though they were. Ibid., 74. She imagines how her body would respond to hunger. “Do I really know what it feels like to be hungry all the time? Like those who have been hungry from generation to generation, whose parents were starving and whose children will starve? I do not.” Weil, Antigone, 60. She asks whether she could imagine being in queue for the gas. “Can I really imagine the procession to the gas chamber? At the time I thought I could; . . . In the face of death would I really have been able to proclaim, ‘But where there is song, there is Orpheus’ [a Rilke verse she memorized to help her cope with extreme moments]?” A grotesque notion. I would have trembled like a terrified animal that does not grasp what is happening to it. Shattered, destroyed.” Ibid., 61. Could she have imagined what actually happened to Waiki’s body? She angrily dares herself to look and to see. She is furious with herself, with her perceived cowardice in the face of Waiki’s death: “Do not try to weasel your way out; be consistent, face the horrible truth, see how it was, how he suffered, a flayed, hunted creature, think, incessantly think that which cannot be thought to an end.” Ibid., 61. The Jewish body was variously exiled. It was the Jewish body that was banned from working in government offices, from the streetcar, and from public baths and park benches. The language, “Jews were banned from using park benches,” obscures the fact that it is the Jewish body that was, at the most fundamental level, manipulated/handled/processed/loaded/unloaded/selected/gassed straight through to the ovens and the settling ponds. “Then they could not leave Amsterdam,” she wrote of constraints on Dutch Jews bodies. “[O]r go to the movies and the theater. We were allowed to shop only between three and five o’clock, . . .” Bodies had to be registered, and it was to bodies that that the yellow star was affixed. “We were marked, out-laws, branded for destruction.” Ibid., 33. Even Weil’s verb betrays what was done to the Jewish body: branded like cattle. It is in the body that the cow feels the iron burn its flesh; it was through the body that the Jew felt existential terror and brutality. Weil finds it difficult not to think in terms of the body when she thinks of suffering. There is the death of her second husband, Urs, from leukemia. “Everyone assures me it was a gentle death.” Ibid., 42. But the night Urs died that “gentle death,” the girl in the next room died horribly, noisily, as bodies are apt to be: “For the nineteen-year-old girl . . . who suffocates and hemorrhages to death the night you die, the death struggle is certainly worse. . . . But the terrible dying, of which I see only the blood-drenched sheets that are whisked out of the room, . . .” Ibid., 42-43. Even the dying girl’s father is reading of bodily horror as his daughter drowns in her own blood. “Once, when he has closed the door behind him I glance out of curiosity at his book. It is The Brothers Karamazov, opened to the part where Ivan describes children being tortured.” Ibid., 43. Scarry discusses the isolating effect of bodily pain. “[Pain] achieves its aversiveness in part by bringing about, even within the radius of several feet, this absolute split between one’s sense of one’s own reality and the reality of other persons.” Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1987), 4. Anyone who has ever known searing, enduring, unrelieveable, unrelenting pain is a specialist in the phenomenology of the experience. Extreme physical pain is the ultimate destroyer of personal worlds in that nothing is thinkable under such conditions except the pain; pain explodes to proportions so great as to fill all of one’s consciousness; even acknowledgement of the existence of an Other can become impossible. One of Scarry’s insights that bears directly on Weil’s work is the idea of being sundered from contact with any other person. The body’s ability to experience pain exiles the Self to a space that cannot be shared. “Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language.” Ibid., 4 Still, Weil struggles to point toward that which so immensely hurts. This kind of pain, including the pain of unendurable grief, which can be experienced as intensely and as destructively as physical pain, cannot be represented with language; its ontology defeats language. It is in this pain that the individual is most utterly, entirely, inescapably alone, lost to the world. Thus it is with Weil’s wound, Waiki’s death – which is the fulcrum on which My Sister My Antigone rests – in its unknowability. Weil uses the language of violence done to a body to describe, to name, Waiki’s death, that which most haunts her: a wound. “My wound bleeds when anyone touches it and sometimes when it is not touched, unexpectedly, unpredictably, when I am swimming in the Mediterranean, discussing an entirely different subject, walking through a city, making love. The wound is there, but sometimes weeks, months, even years pass during which I hardly feel it.” Weil, Antigone, 43-44. The wound brands her, marks her, and she, Grete Weil, embodied, can never be unmarked. I will attempt in the next few pages to unpack some of the work’s most important ideas and map their relationships. First, I will review some of the conceptual aspects of the novel and then look at disparate passages that are the traces of important motifs that recur throughout the text. I am interested to hover over these passages both because of their motivic importance as well as for their aesthetic, narratological, and structural significance. I will follow this with a close textual analysis of a single chapter to demonstrate how Weil puts ideas together to form the tissue of her prose. I have chosen chapter seven because it is a crossroads for several of the most important conceptual and narratologically significant concepts in the work. The novel’s structure is a good place to begin. Instead of a conventional plot, Weil marshals a series of ruminations in which N reflects on her life, memory, aging and infirmity, the arrest and deportation of Waiki, her decision to return to Germany after the war, hiding from the Nazis in Holland, her thoughts on Jewish identity, and, most importantly, on what she regards as her guilt. Taken together, these ruminations “create a mosaic of memories spanning from the early years of [the 20th century] through to the early eighties, creating along its meandering path a portrait of this century's torturous history.” Mattson, “Kinship,” 53. Weil integrates N’s narrative fragments with an exploration of Antigone. Faced with a choice between burying her dead brother, Polyneices, killed in battle, or complying with the decree of Creon, Thebes’ king and Antigone’s uncle, to leave Polyneices’ body untouched on the battlefield, Antigone unhesitatingly chooses for her brother knowing Creon’s punishment may be death. Weil is concerned here to compare N’s and Antigone’s decisions when each is forced to confront situations in which ethically ideal choices may cost each her life. Mattson points out the similarities that Antigone and Weil share. They both experienced pampered childhoods and were especially attached to their fathers and brothers. Both endured enclosure in a claustrophic space, Antigone in a sealed cave, Weil in her behind-the-bookcase hiding space. “At times the very structure of the text blurs the boundaries between the narrator and Antigone’s voices to such an extent that one cannot easily distinguish between them.” Ibid., 58. Just as N is not Weil, Antigone is not the Antigone, if by the latter is meant the codified myth and the Antigone of Sophocles. Weil’s Antigone is, as it were, Weil’s Antigone. The essential structure of the classical myth is present, but, “[s]he can invent romantic interludes with Dionysian shepherds, speculate about further incestuous tendencies in the family, or selectively emphasize and de-emphasize elements of the Sophoclean Antigone just enough to shade the character differently.” “Wenn ich sie erzähle, ist sie meine Antigone.” Mattson, “Mapping Morality,”156. These shadings are important, but the core of Antigone’s character remains stable, i.e., her moral choice-making, its consequences, and the reasons for the choice in light of those consequences. The question then occurs about the common ground shared by Weil and Antigone, as Weil is pulling her story through Antigone’s flame. Weil is decisively elusive, “bald ist sie ein Stück von mir und bald in allem mein Gegenpart.” Ibid., 156. A reader is left to think about, a.) N’s persona; b.) the confluence of N’s persona with Weil’s; c.) Antigone’s persona; and, d.) the common ground that Antigone and N share and, then, the relevance that insight has for Weil’s life. Were this text not in some significant part autobiographical, only the relationship between Antigone and N would be relevant. There is no such luxury here. Weil is not playing guessing games, so seeing alignments and resonances is not beyond the demands of close reading. A fair question is why Weil uses the Antigone story in the first place. Mattson suggests that her story as captured by Sophocles leaves so much open space in her life that it begs to be filled out. In other words, there is room within the myth and Sophocles’ treatment of it for a writer like Weil to intervene and round it out, which is what Weil does – not, certainly, to compensate for Sophocles, but to help articulate ideas, feelings, and memories that are best thought through at some distance from the writer herself. Antigone’s narrative contains a structurally similar ethical dilemma to Weil’s and, given its antiquity, the story is sufficiently Other to offer a necessary cultural and temporal separation. N is all but obsessed with Antigone, whom she calls “my sister” and “my princess.” While the relationship between Grete and Michal in The Bride Price is proximate enough for their narratives to interact, the relationship between N and Antigone is personal, even intimate. Most importantly, Antigone and N share the common ground of having faced the gravest of moral choices. Antigone knows immediately her choice and never wavers in her decision about whether to cooperate with power – she does not – while N feels that she failed utterly when forced to assist or resist the regime’s morally outrageous demands. “While Antigone was saying, “no, no, no,’ I was saying “yes . . . yes . . . yes . . .” Weil, Antigone, 118. Creon is confident of his view of what is important: the city. He will not tolerate attention to the corpse of a man who wished the city ill, even though he is Creon’s nephew, and he threatens to punish Antigone severely if she ignores his command to allow Polynieces’ body to ignominiously rot where he fell. Antigone says no to Creon’s decree and symbolically buries her brother’s body with as much soil as she can scrape up. She does so in full knowledge of the penalty she is likely to incur but with the certainty that she can make no other choice. Like Michal against David and Saul, Antigone is powerless against Creon; all she can do is ignore his proscription, remain true to her conscience, and accept the consequences. Unlike Michal, though, Antigone has agency – she authorizes herself to act on the basis of moral reasoning and traditional practices regarding siblings’ responsibilities to each other; her love for and deep attachment to Polyneices makes her action far from a grudging compliance with tradition. Antigone’s choice is commonly taught as one between the laws of man and the divine law, that of the gods, who see things as does Antigone. But there is a subtler problem at work here: the world is a messy place in which to make good moral decisions. Variables proliferate, the unknowable looms large and lines of tension, congruence and contradiction are pervasive. Perhaps most maddening is that equally good cases can be made for both Creon’s and Antigone’s positions. It is easier to read the Creon/Antigone story as one of good and evil, of bad king, good sister. Instead – and this is what makes it intriguing – it is a story about the tension between good and good. The city’s wellbeing is important and protecting it is legitimate. A sibling’s responsibility to another sibling is also a good; it is legitimate. In his codification of the Antigone, Sophocles sought to explore that which makes this tragedy tragic: Antigone dies because Creon is so invested in exercising asymmetrical power on behalf of a single privileged good that he cannot acknowledge that multiple legitimate goods can compete and that actors may have multiple, ethically defensible responses when it comes to choosing among those conceptions of the good. Nussbaum, Martha Craven. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 51-87. As will become clear, Weil’s Antigone narrative does not track with that of Sophocles; she dies for an entirely different and unpredictable reason. Baackmann asks why Weil chose mythology as a structuring device given the horrific consequences of Germany’s mythologizing. Baackmann, 278. She endorses Weil’s choice, but not before interrogating it in light of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s postwar critique of mythology. For them, “mythology supports rather than challenges the ideological premises of rationalism. Recognizing the fatal exploitation of mythology by the Nazis as the ultimate effect of rationalism, Horkheimer and Adorno trace the logos in seemingly irrational patterns of terror regimes.” Ibid., 278. Baackmann’s question is thus begged as it is not self-evident why Weil, a Holocaust survivor, would choose mythology as a narrative-structuring device. My initial response is that there is a crucial distinction between myth as a substrate for propaganda and myth as a narrative strategy; Weil does not promote an agenda or way of thinking via Antigone; she only appropriates her for narrative purposes. Mattson sees the stories as “so intertwined with one another . . . that it proves difficult to unravel them in a cogent way. This entanglement, however, constitutes one of the book's greatest achievements.” Mattson, Michelle. "Classical Kinship and Personal Responsibility: Grete Weil's Meine Schwester Antigone," Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 37, no. 1 (2001): 54. That is, the narratives sometimes stand alone, are sometimes parallel, and, at other times are inseparable. Regardless of their trajectories, the two strands function to sketch an autobiography and ask difficult questions about the guilt Weil feels as a survivor and the things she did to come through alive. Ibid., 54. The narrative becomes an exploratory instrument with which Weil examines and thinks through her own story, particularly the problem of making choices about questions that have vast moral implications: how did Antigone choose her allegiance given two equally defensible goods, and why did Grete choose to work for the Jewish Council in Amsterdam? Moreover, why did she choose to do virtually nothing out of the ordinary to get Waiki released, i.e., beyond making a first-line plea to one Ludwig Haverkamp, whom the Nazis appointed as the administrator of Jewish businesses in Holland. Weil, Antigone, 45. “She examines these issues not to exonerate herself of any guilt she might have toward those who did not survive, but rather to figure out how, when, and why an individual stands up and says "no." Mattson, “Classical Kinship,” 54. Having raised the question of myth and Germany, Baackmann defends Weil, whom she argues has “a very personal” reason for choosing Antigone. “She creates a narrator who comes to terms with the past in dialogue with Antigone as both a Gedächtnisfigur and a witness who allows her to express experiences difficult to put into words.” Baackmann, 278. This idea goes to the heart of one of the most familiar and problematic questions of writing the Holocaust, i.e., the representational ethics of looking at the thing itself and representing what one sees; that which one sees can never capture the essence of the thing, thus risking its trivialization. Refracting the thing itself may allow an approach that offers some clarity without diminishing the vastness of the thing itself. In Weil’s hands, Antigone becomes a refractor through whom Weil/her narrator interacts to reach a modicum of equilibrium – not peace, not resolution – with memory. Having considered some of the most important structural and thematic elements of the novel, I turn now to a close reading of an entire chapter. My intention is to examine, in a finer-grained way than is possible in a more general discussion, how Weil performs her craft – the techniques she uses and the ways she foregrounds her privileged ideas. I follow this chapter-level overview with textual analyses of smaller blocs from the novel that articulate specific moments of its most important preoccupations. Textual Analysis: How Weil Crafts a Chapter Chapter seven is a lyrical and tragic narrative that marks the exhilaration that is possible while damning the hopelessness of happiness’ short durations, and its consistent defeat by pathological cravings for power that seem woven into the warp and weave of living. Put another way, chapter seven is a wail about the damnable fragility of life lived in joy. The chapter begins with Weil and her Antigone notebook: it haunts her, draws her in, then pushes her away. She has an approach-avoidance relationship with the notebook – that is, with the process of sitting down and puzzling out the parallels and tensions between it and her own life and choices. There is ample evidence to speculate whether the avoidance has something to do with how short of Antigone’s standard of ethical choice that she, Weil, fell when her moments of decision were upon her. It is more complex than that, though. There are elements of positive and negative polarity in both the legend and in Weil’s story. Puzzling those out, seeing how complex the reality is for thinking about moral choice in occupied Amsterdam is rough-going. Weil must do the heavy lifting, but she is conflicted about wading into the thorn bushes. The chapter’s pace accelerates relentlessly after the opening. She talks about a room she and Urs renovated but that turned out to be superfluous. She declares that she belongs in the south, and yet she landed in Holland. But, was that period not punctuated with happiness? Of course. While there, she and Waiki took a trip to Italy, Amalfi, et al. She zooms into a specific moment when she felt so happy that she thought it may prove fatal. Then it all crashed. The happiness that had seemed too intense to bear turned into an unhappiness that seemed too harsh to endure. She means Waiki’s arrest, deportation and death before Weil went into hiding in Holland. The ride becomes more erratic. “Why do we do what we do, and why do we fail to do what we should do?” she asks. Why did she not rescue Waiki? Why did she not assassinate that SS man in ’43. She could have done both; she did neither, and she does not understand why. Weil writes about the sense of things grinding to a halt. It is the thought with which Weil begins the book – waking to a feeling of things beginning, but slamming into the reality, after being awake for only moments, that, in fact, everything is ending. She takes up this idea with a vengeance, with anger wrapped around grief and guilt. “Where did the joy go?” she asks. Weil, Antigone, 71. She remembers the time before the flight to Holland when life exhilarated her. She looked forward to Waiki’s visits and to new books that she absolutely had to have the day they were published. Now, she is overwhelmed that there is nothing to look forward to, no more friendships, no more new Manns and Gides, not even any more moves, except to a nursing home, which she saves for an especially bitter and well-deserved condemnation in which she damns decrepitude along with the importation of middle-brow kitsch, sentimentality, and vapidly cheery narratives. Weil dives into her guilt: after Waiki’s death, she had a choice to make – go into hiding or give herself over to the same fate as Waiki. This is when she could get into the Jewish Council or allow herself the death of the average victim. It is a moment of antigonal choice, a yes or a no. Whether that formulation describes the reality, i.e., whether joining the Amsterdam Jewish Council betrayed Waiki and was tantamount to Antigone saying, “Oh, all right, I’ll leave Polyneices’ body alone” to Creon, is difficult. All that matters, though, is that that is how Antigone came to understand her choice. She remembers joining the Jewish Council, first as an unpaid worker, then as an official staffer. She took pictures of the to-be-deported and she wrote letters for Jews who asked their relatives to bring things they had forgotten. But she feels guilty about the sense of superiority and protection she has with the Jewish Council; she likes her nice clothes, her beautiful Leica camera. She despises the class divisions among the Jews even as she leverages those class divisions to set herself apart and gain some distance from the Nazis. Ibid., 71. But, then, because of their power and the way the Nazis deploy it for administrative tasks, the Jewish Council members can slow deportations and leverage their knowledge of who is about to be sent away and to pick and choose who might can be saved. Even in the moment, N knows she is playing god – saving this person, but not that.   In the immediate aftermath of the war, traipsing through the rubble, she writes that, “I wish for death, which does not come.” Ibid., 76. Here, Weil remembers how she felt immediately after the war when she returned to Germany and saw the devastation of her city where once she lived a carefree life. Even the wish for death is diluted into nothingness by the emptiness she feels, the utterly without. Life resumed multiple times for Weil, only to be slapped down again. Life was good in Munich, then there was the flight to Holland. She tells herself her story: there was the trip to Italy, then Waiki’s death. Should she go into hiding or join Waiki? Should she join the Jewish Council and be a pseudo-collaborator? She chooses the council and then hiding. Once back in Germany, ennui takes over.  “Emptiness is empty, there is nothing left – no happiness, no unhappiness. Emptiness is hollow – I am being hollowed out, becoming a hollow fraud. I do whatever seems appropriate at the moment: Sleep, get dressed, work, talk, even laugh. I behave normally so the others will not notice I am a robot someone has wound up. Robots do not die, they break down. I do not break down, a tough cookie, as they say; I let myself be swept along by the current, swept back to Germany.” Ibid., 76. As I discussed earlier, it was not easy for the Jewish survivor, especially an intellectual, to return. The important thing to note is Weil’s articulation of the sense of emptiness, of hollowness. “I walk through the ruins and feel they belong there; when a world has been destroyed, no buildings should remain unscathed.” Ibid., 76. She does not share a world with others – she feels utterly and forever separated from them, unable to reach them. This is the phenomenology of depression, of having wobbled out of the world of consensus reality. At some point she will re-join the world, in some sense, but even then, she will feel apart, never of a piece with the larger culture. What comes next, toward the end of the chapter, is a mad skid into a dark place. Weil writes about everything getting better in Germany “or worse as the case may be.” Ibid., 76-77. She fast-forwards into the contemporary-present and begins to think about death: “I repress the thought of death as death draws nearer.” This picks up on a thread earlier in the chapter about death becoming more abstract as one approaches it, which teases out a comparison between the death she could have had in Holland and the death she will have as an elderly woman. She suddenly pivots back to Antigone. “What makes Antigone so fascinating: that she, so close to death, should love life. That she has the courage to gamble away life.” Ibid., 77. Weil writes that she cannot imagine Antigone ever returning to a bourgeois, comfortable life.  That is precisely what Weil did, and it is a source of her self-disgust. And so the chapter ends with the recurrent suicide motif that laces the novel. Weil is in the bathroom taking out a bottle of pills. “There are the pills. Hundred of them in a brown bottle with the screw lid. Next to the 20 suppositories in the little box.” This is a typical articulation of the tension Weil experiences between the desire not to exist and the fear of death. Her demons are guilt and fear of bodily decay. “I pour them back into the bottle, squeeze in the cotton, screw on the top, and put them back, next to the suppositories. My palms are covered with white powder. I lick it off. It tastes bitter. I gargle with mouthwash, apply lipstick, and leave the bathroom.” Ibid., 78 What is happening is a reconciliation with suppositories and sleeping pills. The first reference to suppositories suggests the humiliation of old-age, while the pills hint at the liberation they could provide from decrepitude. In the second reference, the suppositories are next to the bottle of sleeping pills that she puts back on the shelf, suggesting that, for the moment, she will go on with life and endure the body’s incremental implosion. She waffling back and forth about going on or ending the tedious suffering does not end here. She expresses fatigue with life and age, yet, moments later, she dreads death. Weil recalls keeping a cyanide capsule in her pocketbook – just in case. She could have used it rather than work for the Jewish Council and help the deportation machinery function. But, she did not. Now, in old age, lonely and afflicted by guilt, she once again has what she needs to kill herself. So, she asks, “Why not do it? Right now, this very minute? Does my work hold me back?” Ibid., 73. It is not until the end of the chapter that she pours the pills from hand to hand thinking about her choices, and decides to put the medicine back. It is not only whether to live that Weil is conflicted about. While, as a moral stance, she recoils at the injustice of socio-economic strata, she also recoils at the taste of the petty bourgeoisie, neither poor nor affluent, but with enough resources to pretend to a status that sets them apart from the herd. That pretense and the contempt that goes with it are appalling and funny. Weil speaks of her attempt not to show repulsion for poor taste. When she is given a bite of the bad cake that is sickly sweet, she may say “crap,” but without letting herself be heard. ”The element of amusement outweighs the humiliation,” she writes. Ibid., 74. Weil does not have to point out that she was as guilty of false pride as the middle-brows she holds in contempt. Troubling here is not so much the class issues and their sadness and comedy, but the way Weil describes certain categories of Jews who are unfamiliar to her and therefore repellent. The language she uses to describe them borders on the crude: alien, difficult, suspicious of outsiders, oriental, . . .  Weil indicts herself, and not by accident. One of the subtexts running through the novel concerns the foibles and failures of victims who themselves can be oppressors, or, at least, not necessarily the best of friends to their fellow Jews compared to whom they would like to think themselves better. In-Depth Textual Analysis: How Weil Crafts Central Ideas Weil critics seem reluctant to take a plunge into the details of the text in order to explore what makes the writing, as a fusion of ideas and prose-craft, a notable achievement. In much criticism, the text becomes a point of departure for theory or intellectual history. Both are important, but the tendency to neglect the writer’s language itself distracts from the sensuality of the text – the deftness with which the writer clothes ideas in words. That is found in the syntactical and lexical textures that remain at arm’s length if criticism never reaches the text itself; thinking about literature becomes the proverbial equivalent of reading about sex. Peter Szondi’s meticulous unpacking of Celan’s Engführung reaches an ideal level of analysis that is sophisticated and rooted in the words on the page. See Paul Celan, Celan Studies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 27-82. It is the writing qua writing that should bring one to Weil as much as the urgency of her ideas. To be successful literary writing of the Holocaust While this is a much-debated subject over which much intellectual energy is spilled, I will dispense with argument and, for my present purpose, insist on a distinction between the term “Holocaust literature” and the phrase “literary writing of the Holocaust.” The former term can be dispensed with because it reduces that body of work to a genre. Literary art and genre are mutually exclusive. This involves more than switching out labels. I will challenge the notion that writing which is out of the Holocaust is necessarily identifiable as such. I need only point to W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. Just as non-representational painting can more incisively capture the essence of an idea or a thing than can a representational work, literary works that never mention the camps or explicitly name a Holocaust trauma can incisively capture the essence of a moment in extremis. must occur at the highest level of literary art and at the most sophisticated and subtle levels of perception and feeling. To implement this approach to textual analysis that is more the savoring of the dish than a reflection on food chemistry, I offer some of the most sensitive and painful passages in Antigone and map them to the theoretical and conceptual concerns with which this study deals. Her dog and loss. Her dog was “[t]he last being who was all mine, who needed me, whom I fed and doted on, who gave me a reason for living, whom I failed, all because I could not bring myself to say no, out of an indolence I pretended was love.” Weil, Antigone, 12. It was no animal I was mourning for. In my poor head he grew and grew, would no longer fit into my room, into my house, and then with his terrible size he battered down all the walls I had painstakingly erected around myself in the course of the last forty years to enable me to live. I regret, profoundly regret, that I am still alive, and do not understand how it is possible. . . . But when my dog disappeared, I began to brood on all the conceivable forms of slaughter, and now I ask myself time and time again what sort of a person I am that I can live with Waiki’s murder.” Ibid., 32. Here is N’s fundamental difference from Antigone: N claims that she lacked the moral clarity to say “no.” In this case, she could not insist on the equivalent of, “No, you can’t run free,” for her dog. That was her responsibility. But, like all the other things she reproaches herself for having said yes to, this choice was a catastrophe for the dog. She sees catastrophe in every choice she made that involved her failing to draw a line: “No, beyond this point I will not go.” Had she done that in Amsterdam, she would have died, which would have been catastrophic for her personally, but it would have saved her the grief of having survived, and she would not feel that she lived only to betray both herself and Waiki. This is only to follow out the narrator’s logic, not to suggest that this is what the N should have done. Unpredictably, the death of her dog takes on major significance. In the dog’s disappearance and likely death, N feels the resonance of her guilt about Waiki. By letting her beloved dog run free, she is complicit in his death. Like Waiki, there is no body. She cannot know exactly when or how he died. Most salient is that the creature is dead and that she did not do all she could to prevent this outcome. So traumatic is this knowledge about her dog that, in her mind’s eye, the puppy expands to frightening proportions, destroying not just her house, but her entire structure of coping that “I had painstakingly erected around myself in the course of the last forty years to enable me to live.” Weil, Antigone, 32. This metaphor of the dog’s size is striking because it captures the contradictory idea of this much-loved animal becoming the malevolent source of N’s undoing, the destruction of the structures she has created to psychically survive. “His terrible size,” “he battered down” that which was so painstakingly erected.” Finding that the capacity for destruction and malevolence can exist even within a source of such comfort and peace as a dog is heartbreaking and startling. It provokes thinking about one’s own essential psychical survival structures and whether these most intimate and treasured assumptions and tangible/intangible sources of comfort could become damning. Antigone enters the narrative. Tired again already, I yawn, lie down on the sofa, pull the afghan up to my chin and let my thoughts dwell on my princess, my favorite plaything for longer than I can remember. I do not recall when and where we first met. Was it my father, with his classical education and his belief that the world was intact and meaningful, who introduced me to her, or my big brother, who after four years in the trenches in France no longer harbored any illusions? Ibid., 12. Antigone enters when Weil is working on her as an old woman who easily tires. Nothing foreshadows her appearance except perhaps that N has catalogued some of her losses. Here is a possession, something that cannot be taken from her except by her own body, the physical capacity to write. That risk hangs over the page as it becomes clear how important Antigone is to her and yet how frail N is. The reference to her father foreshadows a crucial motif that will recur, i.e., the tension between her world that fell apart from irrationality and the model of a coherent world that she inherited from “my father, with his classical education and his belief that the world was intact and meaningful, . . .” Her father’s humanism included knowledge of classical antiquity, which she speculates is one source of her becoming aware of Antigone. Antigone’s dark side: Now I recognized her self-destructiveness, her incestuous passion for Polyneices, a kind of vanity, and the arrogance characteristic of martyrs, who right or wrongly consider themselves superior to others.” Ibid., 14 These qualities humanize Antigone for N, but part of humanizing would-be heroic figures is recognizing that they are rarely one-dimensional. In The Bride Price, Grete talks about “this terrible superiority” – Grete’s feeling that her experience renders her superior; she also feels superior in being a German and does not deserve, as it were, to be treated like a Jew, to be thought of “as a Jew and nothing but a Jew.” Weil, The Bride Price, 35, 143. But N does not make self-destructive choices and is not given to martyrdom, which is why N carries the wound of survivorship. So, Antigone, when N thinks about her as a whole, becomes an exemplar, one with a robust-enough ego to say no to power, even if that no comes from the same place as arrogance and inflexible application of moral principle. N is fascinated by how Antigone saw her way clear to resist, to pay the price, to be so confident despite the stakes and the fact that she loved life. Weil, Antigone, 77 This passage also betrays the few moments when N finds elements in Antigone that are alienating. While it is true that N did not have Antigone’s moral courage, N suggests that there may be more than moral courage involved, e.g., vanity, a will to self-destruction, and arrogance. N recognizes these departures from Antigone’s mythic persona, but, preoccupied with the robustness and confidence of Antigone’s ethical choice-making, she makes little of them, which may be unfortunate. There are passages when Weil hints at a more complex Antigone, but she never explores the possibilities that doubt, uncertainty, decision-making in a context of incomplete information, and the risks of rigidly implementing an ethical code might have had for Antigone. Weil’s Antigone could have been developed in this way, leading to a critical interrogation of choice-making from a position of unwavering certainty, which, when paired with hatred, was the single greatest monstrosity of the Nazi mind. Weil chose to keep Antigone intriguing, but comparatively uncomplicated and unanguished. “Where has all the joy gone?” Then it dawns on me that nothing is about to begin; on the contrary, everything – and now this everything comes into clear focus as everything connected with my own life – is grinding to a halt. I am old, an old woman. Ibid., 7.. . . And where has all the joy gone? The joy I used to feel. In two days Waiki is coming. Still forty-eight hours to go. If I spend three hours working on my report on Georg Büchner, it will be only forty-five. Then eight hours of sleep. When I get up: thirty-seven left. Tomorrow is almost here. Tomorrow Waiki will come Or a hike in the mountains. A carnival ball. A trip. The latest Thomas Mann book, the latest Gide on my bedside table. Staying up all night reading. There is no latest Thomas Mann book anymore, no latest Gide. And no equivalent. Ibid., 71 This is the far side of loss – where mourning is no less severe, but, because N is elderly and sensitive to her mortality, the mourning is augmented by anxieties about the meaning of living and suffering and how long they have to go on. There is the irony that the nothingness of death is the price of relief from N’s wound, her mourning. “Where has all the joy gone?” is a cliché rescued by the personal specificity of recollected joys. These are the banal and prosaic magics of anticipation that seem so dear when their loss cannot be recouped and for which there is no consolation. Weil’s illustrations are all the more powerful because they are near-universal experiences. She counts down the time before one of Waiki’s visits. Such a simple and fragile thing, a visit; so little needs to go wrong for a reunion to fail, for anything from inconvenience to catastrophe to assume the place of the anticipated joy of lovers embracing after a separation. More is at work here than a young woman’s pining for her boyfriend. The context is frightening and risky; the future dreaded at best. “Waiki,” though carries associations of being alive to the world: to carnival balls, mountain hikes, journeys. It is the juxtaposition of all these things, the evocations and associations of “a trip” with new books from Mann/Gide – these are palpable pleasures that thrum within the syntax and establish connections with a reader who now encounters the idea of not feeling them again – reproduces a co-experience with Weil. There is the richness of the words and their personal and cultural evocations. Now, map this to Weil’s survivor context – it is old age, which is loss – and place it in a life lived under the sign of loss and guilt. A reader cannot help but feel the sinking, the hollowness, with N. Self-indictment. For the first time it became clear to me that I had let myself be destroyed. It was not all Hitler’s fault. It takes two for something like that, one to do it and the other to accept it. He promulgated insane laws, and I obeyed them. How could I take myself seriously if I argued that as a Jew I had no choice? I did not say no. Saying no is the only freedom that cannot be taken from you. Antigone made superb use of it. I said yes. Yes, I shall leave Germany, yes, I am no longer a German, yes, I shall give up my writing, yes, I shall wear the yellow star, yes, I shall type letters in the vile Schouwburg, yes, I shall make no effort to spring Waiki from the concentration camp, yes, I shall answer to a name that is not my own, yes, I shall not shoot the SS captain. In this way I shall save my life while destroying myself. If something has been destroyed, neither magic nor divine mercy can bring it back to life. Ibid., 118. Here is the intellectual heart of the novel – the conflict between N and herself, the notion of the self’s complicity in the self’s destruction. Put another way, Weil is suggesting that there is a cruel irony in that the enemy gives an individual the option to draw a line that denotes how far she will go toward accommodation, then demanding that he cross it. The enemy wagers that she will concede and comply rather than face severe punishment or death, that she will collapse and allow her fear and cowardice to destroy her if the enemy does not destroy her first. Self-destruction becomes a joint effort in assent. It is remarkable for Weil to write the sentence, “It was not all Hitler’s fault.” That a survivor could inscribe those words given that, on its face, it makes N and every victim complicit, is breathtaking. She drives the point home with the rhetorical series, “Yes . . . yes . . . yes . . .” It takes some syntactical twisting to formulate questions that are answered yes when the question would actually be answered no, i.e., “. . . yes, I am no longer a German, yes, I shall make no effort to spring Waiki . . .” But the locution draws attention to an assent to a negative, Yes, I am not . . . Weil yearns for the courage to stand up and resist, to say no, and uses the occasion of a speech given by the SS commander of the Schouwburg in Amsterdam to Jewish Council members to illustrate a moment when she could have responded to her deepest ethical reflex and resisted, thereby defining herself by a profoundly costly choice. “‘You are here to guard the prisoners and I categorically forbid you to speak with the prisoners any more than necessary. Is that clear? Anyone who disobeys will be shipped out with the prisoners.’ No one stirs, no one speaks. I want to step forward and say: I am not a prison guard. I am the same as those I am supposed to guard, a Jew, a human being. I want to, but I do not.” She remembers her mother, though, and her promise to protect her. She submits. Defeated. I read Weil’s claim about victim complicity as intentionally provocative rather than a global condemnation of herself and all European Jews for not saying no to Hitler. Besides it being unclear what no would have looked like, I cannot accept that Weil asks this question seriously. Rather, I offer that she is venting her anger at herself; perhaps she gets ahead of herself as she becomes angrier. Despite the fact that the logic of her syntax denotes a shared responsibility for European Jews’ murders, I contend she is thinking only of her own case. She is furious that she said yes, yes, yes again and again. The problem of the claim’s scope perhaps has its root in Weil’s comparing her yes with Antigone’s no. She exclusively makes a one-to-one comparison, herself and Antigone. There is no point in the text at which Weil betrays the remotest sense of collective Jewish guilt; there is, however, abundant evidence throughout the text for Weil blaming herself for her personal choice-making responsibility. Nightmare at world’s end. It was not only the women who were dreaming; you were, too. Dreaming the worst dream of your life, witnessing the slaughter of your beloved, seeing your two little children pitched onto the truck. You stood by, motionless, one of the murderers. And I am standing next to you, dreaming like you, knowing that I am dreaming, unable to wake up, because I sense that behind the glassy rigidity of the dream something else awaits me: reality, even more brutal. Now and again we look at each other and immediately lower our eyes: an admission of failure. I am standing on the truck that goes to the cemetery. I do not protest, do not shout, am surprised that I do not protest, that I do not shout, that I am a puppet that simply accepts everything. Puppets that murder, puppets that allow themselves to be murdered, in this dream at world’s end, this dream you have flung over me, a deadly, poisoned mesh in which I am entangled for all eternity. Ibid., 123-124. This is from a letter that N imagines writing to Friedel, a German soldier who wrote a detailed account of the Piotrkow, Poland, liquidation, but disappeared fighting somewhere in Poland. This letter is fiction, but the written report by Friedel is real; N claims it existed in Weil’s life. N explains that Friedel’s brother recently found the crumbling manuscript while sorting through old letters and gave the document to N. The report, in whole, appears in the novel as chapter fifteen. Ibid., 150-178. It is, in fact, a reasonable, if rebuttable, presumption that such a document existed for Weil. The text is devastating. “You recorded in writing what took place there, probably in order to preserve your sanity,” N imagines writing. Ibid., 123. The passage is structured as a monologue by N who imagines that she was there in Piotrkow as she and Friedel witnessed the barbarity. N has the two of them crossing over into a dream state, having breached the divide between consensus reality and a conscious but traumatized, stupefied, and pseudo-somnolent mode, rendered that way by the extremity of what they witness. The key moment occurs when N and Friedel look at each other and lower their eyes in shame, “an admission of failure.” N proposes that their actions or inactions – N’s and Friedel’s and the many thousands like them – are responsible for what they witness, their hands guilty of a collapse of courage, of antigonal choices made poorly, of having failed all the children who, like Friedel’s, are being murdered throughout the Reich. It is an image of the guilty watching the guilty engage in genocide. Their world in ruins, they “dream at world’s end,” not just another truck being loaded with victims. Here is the deepest ring of hell, and what is happening is irremediable, unstoppable – it is too late for that. No creature, human or angel, can return to this scene and repair what is so profoundly broken. This is a scene of anguished mourning, a labor of watching death be done to innocents even as the two watching share in the responsibility for this pit from which few will escape. Entry to the dream state of chapters 16 and 17. The beginning dream sequence is too amazing as a virtuosic linguistic performance even in translation not to linger over it here – to think about how it works, especially the relationship between craft and content. The novel has 18 chapters; sixteen and seventeen are a poet’s dream-like welcome to a land where hell is not only known, but where it lasts forever. Here, the things that have been broken will stay broken no matter the angel’s passion to return and fix them. N feels exhausted, goes to bed, is alternately cold and hot. “I have drawn up my legs and am lying there like an embryo.” Then the transition to sleep. “Am everywhere and nowhere, am myself and others too.” And then N is fully into a dream state. “Ride a splendidly bridled steed over broad plains, sleep in a tent at the foot of the mountains with the dark prince, dissolve in tenderness, glide over the snow on skis, struggle through brambles, spread my arms and fly above the clouds.” Just before these moments, N is confronted with a young woman who needs a place to hide from the police. It is not clear why the police want her, but the incident brings to the surface memories of being hunted down, the trauma of knowing that one is hunted and marked for death. “Smell the fragrance of the macchia and the creosote of the Schouwburg [where Amsterdam’s Jews were gathered for deportation], hear music and cries and groans and sobs and thundering bells, . . . see young dogs romping and children burned by napalm, see the Death Steps with the prisoners in striped suits. I push them aside, run up the steps and back down, and cannot find Waiki, feel kisses on my skin and am beaten with a whip until I collapse.” This is a rich, wicked, commanding passage, the kind that elevates this novel from the very good to the masterful. It is a mélange of images, some already familiar from the text, some entirely new: “hear music and cries and groans and sobs and thundering bells, see young dogs romping and children burned by napalm, . . .” The language calls itself out to be read and reread until the aesthetic surface gives way to the language’s referents. Weil’s language is not masterful in order to be masterful, though, but to carry the text’s images with immediacy and terror. The sentence, “hear music and cries . . .” is a hybrid of Bosch and Associated Press photojournalism out of Viet Nam. I will argue that this passage, and others like it to come, is beautiful; it is not pretty, but it is beautiful, lush, dark, terrifying. Like the mushroom cloud over Alamorgordo, it is a terrible beauty. Desire to die. I sit in a cave, trembling with the cold and damp, am hungry and thirsty, have to die, want to die, cannot die; dying is something you have to master. I am often amazed at how many people manage to die. In the end they are dead, have got it behind them, while I still have it before me. It would be nice to do it with a bit of style, ‘as a soldier stout and true,’ like Valentine in Faust, as one has lived, or believes one has lived. Weil, Antigone, 181. In all that follows, N and Antigone – when she enters the narrative – are within N. N imagines Antigone, imagines or dreams her own thoughts. It is important to be clear about this as multiple voices will emerge. To begin, both N, dreaming, and Antigone, dreamt by N, make certain assertions. First, there is the alignment of having to die, wanting to die, and being unable to die. Sealed in a cave, Antigone would seem to have little choice about her fate. As N occupies her, though, Antigone takes away the intended punishment and declares that she wants to die. Most condemned to death resist with every resource at their disposal. Antigone/N, here in N’s dream, is not just content to go, but wants to go. Notable about this passage is its denotative chaos: in fact, whose voice is this? N’s? Antigone’s? N channeling Antigone in her dream? N simply making assertions about her own wishes and imagining, interior to her dream, that she occupies a cave? The text is ambiguous, and I feel no need to pin it down and preserve it with chloroform; I am comfortable accommodating the possibilities. Weil confronts N, i.e., herself, with Antigone. It would miss the point to insist on aligning this with the previous paragraph in which N or Antigone may be speaking, although it seems likely that it is N. What is without question is that Weil gives the floor unambiguously to Antigone. “You are stealing my death from me. That is not fair – my death belongs to me and me alone.” Antigone, in a yellow dress – a recurring motif when N imagines her – explains that she did not commit suicide so that she could die in the cave sooner rather than later, but because she did not want to sacrifice her identity as an independent human, a sensibility she acquired while passing through the mountains with Oedipus. She did not want to return to “the bonds of conventionality, which would have involved marrying Haemon, Creon’s son, to whom she was betrothed but did not love. “[T]he idea did not come to me until Haemon’s slave had almost finished rolling aside the boulder at the mouth of the cave, when I saw light flooding in and realized I was supposed to be dragged back into the bonds of conventionality. Ibid., 181. Antigone’s experience in the mountains had been revelatory: “The nights . . . taught me to think, taught me to feel. . . . Until I was up in the mountains and finally grasped the fact that I was gifted for only one art: being a sister.” Ibid., 183. A remarkable passage follows that narrates her burying Polyneices and being beaten by Creon’s guards. It verges on a manifesto for intellectual, ethical, and gendered personal freedom. After burying Polyneices, Antigone “shouted it out for all to hear: He who demands unconditional obedience acts against life.” Ibid., 184. While being pummeled, her hair pulled, her stomach kicked, Antigone reached a point of acceptance and even euphoria: “I felt no more pain. The harder they tried to humiliate me, the more I felt my dignity. My joy, my sorrow made me blessed.” Ibid., 184. Dragged before Creon, she declaimed that “[n]o human being comes into the world to hate.” Ibid., 184. The chapter’s final scene – still occurring in Weil’s dream – is an erotic and deeply ethical moment that bears on Weil’s Holocaust wound: the difficulty she feels living with herself in light of Waiki and having survived. The two women, N and Antigone, are body to body. N writes, “She bends over me. Embraces me. Does not pull away anymore. Stays with me.” Ibid., 185. In this embrace, Antigone says to N: “You keep searching for my secret, yet it is so simple: Feel and think yourself, not me.” Ibid., 185. Antigone is exhorting N to live according to her own experience rather than continue comparing her choices during the war with the choices Antigone made when confronted with a choice between two legitimate but competing goods: “Never ask: Do you love me as I love you? Always say: It is I who love you. Do not resist yourself. Accept. Learn to empty yourself, that you may absorb the fullness of life.” Ibid., 185. Antigone gives N agency and exhorts her not to make herself contingent on another person’s choices or method of choice-making. The scene ends by N pleading for Antigone not to abandon her: “You have taken away the net that promised me safety.” Ibid., 185. N is thrown back on her own resources. Part of this is loving without expecting love in return. Antigone rejects, not N, but an obligation to love N because N loves her. That is, N must not try to become N by drawing on Antigone: tell your own story, she demands; love if you choose, but do not expect reciprocity. I introduced the concept of condemnatory attachment in my discussion of The Bride Price to explicate the relationship between Michal and David. This notion is similarly at work here, but in a more subtle form. N is attached to Antigone – quite a different figure than David, but nonetheless as central to N’s sense of security. In this dream, N finds Antigone pushing her away, not exactly condemning her, but certainly articulating that this attachment is unhealthy and incompatible with the human good because it implies dependence. In her dreamt excoriation of N, Antigone makes of N’s valence one of condemnatory attachment, thus aligning the behaviors of Michal and N in relation to David and Antigone. Michal disappears into the shadows without giving much hope that she will grow beyond her attachment, but it seems likely that N finds some measure of liberating autonomy. This ends chapter 16 and prepares the way for the penultimate chapter that, as much as any text in the novel, demands to be read slowly and carefully to understand what Weil is about and how this chapter comports with her overall project. Chapter 17 opens with N semi-awake having emerged from a dream-filled sleep. She awakens just enough to articulate Antigone’s (dreamed) exhortation and bring it into the waking world. “Hovering on the verge of slumber, no enemy can touch me. The family protects me. My fortress.” Ibid., 187. This fortress notion resonates with the absence of Antigone as a salvific solution by replacing the Antigone figure with the family. Conformity, especially its resistance, is an important motif in the novel, and a good example follows. N shows anxiety about conforming to avoid trouble rather than saying no. “When mother has her lady friends to tea, I am supposed to put on my blue velvet dress, go down to the parlor, and make the rounds, curtsying and shaking hands. Why do I not rebel? Because I think it is not worth the effort. All unsuspecting, I fall into the trap of conforming and receive no answers to the questions that trouble me.” Ibid., 188. The dream explores N’s tendency to conform, to say yes rather than, hell no. Balla, Feamle. “Hell+no.” Urban Dictionary. December 14, 2003. Accessed May 30, 2015. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hell+no. The same themes surface: she did not object vigorously enough when Waiki was arrested, she did not forbid the dog from running free, she did not rebel against the Nazis’ laws and take out an SS commander while she was at it. Echoes of Ismene are here. Ismene, in her passivity, did not want to get out in front and defy Creon. She held back, let Antigone take the principled and dangerous stand of noncompliance. When N made the kind of choice that Ismene did, she loathed herself. Her conformity defeated her. N felt the pain of non-conformity early and sought to avoid it. She remembers a 1929 school essay on nationalist-consciousness-raising by an 18th-century German writer. Even though supposed to write about “German consciousness,” she writes about tolerance. “[I wrote that] Lassing’s overriding concern was tolerance, something that at no time could be subsumed under German consciousness. I close with Hofmannsthal’s words: ‘His significance for the nation lies in his critical attitude toward the very concept of German consciousness.’ I receive a 5 for the essay, the lowest grade. ‘Complete misinterpretation of the topic.’” Weil, Antigone, 191. The message is clear: tell the power-holders what they do not want to hear, give them the “wrong” answer, and the cost can be high. But what N discovers is that not conforming when defiance is ethically mature can be essential to autonomy. N realizes she has said “yes” to the detriment of her genuine freedom, but she does not understand until this dream that she is still being dependent – on Antigone. She is using the exemplar of “no” in a way that keeps her unfree, dependent. She concedes this: “I want to write about [Antigone], want to be her, but when the opportunity presents itself to take arms against hate, I leave the dead unburied.” Ibid., 191-192. Antigone took her principle all the way to Polyneices’ corpse. The “arms” suggests her regret at having not killed the SS commander when she (almost) had the chance. Ibid., 69. N picks up the device of dreaming in a pseudo-slumber, or wakeful dreaming, in scenes that are among the most nightmarish in these last pages of the novel. The setting is below-deck in a storm-thrashed ship; N is vomiting into a pail, Waiki wants to empty the bucket and gets a violent response from an N this side of whom has not been evident before: “Waiki towers over me, green in the face. He wants to take away my pail. ‘Just for a moment.’ ‘Go to hell.’” Ibid., 193. In the next memory/dream fragment, the boat becomes a warship in battle. Waiki walks away from where N is sick, but is now running back as explosives fall all around. “Another hit, and he is no longer there. I stand where I was, with blood pouring down me, over my face, my hands.” Ibid., 193. N is drenched in Waiki’s blood. She has cursed him; now he is dead. She is covered in him. The resonance is with N’s guilt. Waiki’s death remains something of an abstraction to N – he disappeared and she only learned about it at great remove. Only moments before, in another dream fragment, N declaims that she does not know or want to know whether there were crematoria in Mauthausen, where Waiki was sent. She grows furious and screams that she does not care about any of the things she cares most about. “[I don’t know] [w]hether they ripped his heart out of his chest and threw it to the dogs. It does not matter to me.” Ibid., 192. This unthinkable-except-in-dream-state horror is already present when the more recent fragment has N invite Waiki to “go to hell.” Now, as if in answer to that anger, N is bathed in Waiki’s blood. The fragments continue in this manner through the end of the chapter, each rooted in an everyday activity that morphs into nightmare. Digging in the garden becomes N digging her grave one moment and N working the ground as a camp prisoner the next. Lifting firewood becomes carrying rocks up the Death Steps at Mauthausen. No sooner is the last fragment wrapped than another takes its place. N goes for a performance of Fidelio. She hears Florestan sing of being led by Leonore to freedom and peace. But, instead of the tenor, the handwritten words from Waiki’s last letter float in his place. “Forever yours, Waiki.” She, Leonore, is unable to lead Fidelio out. When Fidelio collapses in the dream, N understands Fidelio to be Waiki, is overcome and flees the theatre, handkerchief covering her mouth. Ibid., 195-196. Terror takes the place of terror. Then, surprisingly, here at the very end of the novel, there is the clearest statement yet of Creon’s position regarding Polyneices’ body. But it is delivered by Haverkamp, the officer who refused to help N get Waiki out of detention in Holland. Antigone now becomes N’s double – it is Antigone, not N, who pleads her case to Haverkamp. Antigone kneels before Haverkamp, pleading with him to help her. “I would do it gladly, Princess, but I cannot. Creon embodies the State, and without the State, life as a community is not possible. “What harm can it do the community if a dead man is buried?” “It is a matter of principle. Obeying a law is a symbol of submission. Just as for you, dear child, your deed was a symbol of rebellion.” “Not of rebellion. Of humane behavior.” “It comes to the same thing. Humane behavior is always rebellion.” Were musical equivalents of these passages embedded in a symphonic work, they would be marked poco a poco accelerando – gradually accelerating, growing in intensity with each fragment. The intensification follows in a three-part passage that concerns the couple Klaus and Doris. It follows a dramatic arc that sees Klaus and Doris destroyed, their situation becoming worse as the Germans come closer to defeat. The text is arranged by time periods – before, during and after Hitler. Before before, Klaus and Doris offer N a drug: “It will be like no trip you have ever taken, you will have incredible dreams.” Ibid., 197. N worries that saying no will confirm for Klaus and Doris her “bourgeois origins” and prevent her “from ever being one of them.” Ibid., 197. She struggles with the meaning of courage and cowardice. Then she flees, walks out without explanation. During Hitler, Klaus and Doris emigrate; Doris serves in the French Resistance and with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War; Klaus becomes an American soldier. After Hitler, Klaus and Doris meet in Cannes where Klaus kills himself and Doris “drinks herself to death.” Ibid., 197. The thing that makes Klaus and Doris important is that they did not survive. “Both of them died of our times. Truer to themselves than I.” Ibid., 197. It is Weil’s survivor guilt again, although I suggest that, in this instance, she broadens the pathology to which she, Klaus and Doris succumbed along the lines of history’s rupture, the collapse of the Western metaphysic in the center of its birth. It remains unclear why Weil chose to introduce Klaus and Doris here as they never appear again and Weil does not explicitly develop a critique of the Western metaphysic’s implosion-by-Auschwitz. Their experience marks the place of the many non-Jewish Germans who detested the regime and gave their lives to help ensure its defeat. What makes their deaths intriguing is their traumatic end after Europe was pulled out of the beast’s maw. Perhaps they were ruined by what they had seen or by what they did to survive, or simply by What Happened. Regardless, “our times” killed them, and it is richly provocative to leave the interpretive possibilities open. Antigone returns, this time as a presence accompanying N in a dream fragment in which she, N, is walking home from visiting her mother – in the dream – who is in hiding. N’s shoes do not fit because her feet are swollen from undernourishment; the pain is intense. “Antigone walks beside me, say, ‘Come along now, come.’ She is a balm, a mild breeze, freshly fallen snow in the mountains, a tower of courage that supports me.” Ibid., 198. And then she is gone. The chronology is off as N does not become engaged by Antigone until much later as an older woman, but, here, in the dream, the constraints of chronology vanish and N thinks about Antigone during N’s time in hiding. Antigone is again providing emotional support as both a coping and self-condemnation device. This Antigone appears after Antigone has manifested in Weil’s dream exhorting her to accept herself and stop seeking both a model for the right way to choose and as an indictment of how N actually chose. The scene shifts to the tables that the Amsterdam Jewish Council has set up to receive and take information from the rounded-up. The scene is sickening, and N captures that: “A stink of oil on the sea, spoiling everything with its putrid ooze.” Ibid., 198. Antigone is the next name called to approach the tables and give information. She antagonizes the SS captain by not giving the conventional information, e.g., address, a predictable two-or-three-word name. The captain approaches Antigone. “Then she pulls a revolver out of her dress, aims it at the SS captain, who stands there rigid, and presses the trigger.” Antigone’s words to the captain before firing are opposite of those she actually speaks in the play and which were noted earlier. “I cannot share in love, but in hatred.” Her words in Sophocles’ play were, “No human comes into the world to hate.” Ibid., 184. Her meaning is enigmatic, but I venture that Weil intends her to mean that she, Antigone, cannot feel love because the SS captain feels no love, but, since he feels hatred and that is the ground on which they meet, she can share in that hatred, say no to what the captain represents and what he intends to do, and enforce that no with a revolver round. When Antigone fires the weapon, there is a shot, but not the usual sequelae of a shooting, blood, a body, et al. Instead, “[f]rom all sides appear men in long Goebbels-style coats, with caps whose visors shade their faces. They approach Antigone. Ibid., 199. There is a quick cut to a gray space outside a prison. N is cold; she is waiting, but she does not know for what. “The heavy gate of the prison opens a crack, and a little figure slips out, in a yellow dress, her feet in sandals. She quickly runs toward me, throws herself into my arms, weeping.” Ibid., 200. This is Antigone in the yellow dress. N wants to take Antigone someplace warm, but she has orders – she cannot recall from whom – to remain in place. N’s memory, her comprehension of her situation, is obliterated; she is lost, clueless, and holding the being on whom she came to depend as she coped with her mourning and her guilt. “Where do I come from? Where do I belong? In what country? In what place?” Ibid., 200. Hers is the survivor’s mind, the displaced person’s. Now united with “my princess,” she is clueless about the past and present, but clearly must make choices about what to do next. The dramatic zenith of the narrative is at hand. “Suddenly I let her go, and she falls to the ground, remains lying where she fell.” Ibid., 200. I read this passage as one about liberation into full personal autonomy. Earlier, it was N who feared falling if Antigone insisted that she, N, stand on her own rather than appropriating strength from the Antigone narrative as well as using it to resist accepting herself and the choices she made because of the difference between Antigone’s no and N’s yes . . . yes . . . yes . . . Now it is Antigone’s turn to fall from N’s arms; N does not need her anymore; N must not need her. N is thrown back on herself to find answers to those fundamental questions about her history, place of belonging, and how to live. N awakens from the dream, puts on her bathrobe, and goes to look out over Frankfurt. There are cars, prostitutes, vacant lots with bulldozed ruins, the library façade “left standing as a monument, a reminder.” “It is all atrociously ugly,” N writes. Ibid., 201. Despite the aesthetics, N has made peace with her circumstances. “I feel the ugliness, am one with the ugliness, which swirls around me. I let it wrap itself around me, accept it, accept myself, am happy. And tomorrow?” Ibid., 201. It is not a strong ending. To the extent that N = Weil, she is not, she cannot be happy. There is nothing in the previous 200 pages to suggest that happiness might suddenly emerge in the last few sentences. To be happy would be for the world not to have been ruined, for humans not to be murderers; it would require the wound to heal, and for the woman, who explained to her dog that she, Grete, in The Bride Price, was so infrequently happy because she was Jewish, to have fundamentally changed. None of these things has changed, which raises a suspicion that an editor demanded the last three sentences be tacked on at the last minute. There is no evidence in the literature, though, that Weil was ever troubled by the ending. Might it be that Weil is following an Aristotelian sense of tragedy such that tragedy “cleansed the heart through pity and terror . . . making us aware that there can be nobility in suffering”? "The Different Types of Greek Drama and Their Importance," PBS, accessed May 18, 2015, http://www.pbs.org/empires/thegreeks/background/24c.html. This is a risible Tolstoyan idea at best, not a trace of which has to this point surfaced in Weil. Suffering is not ennobling; it is suffering. Aristotelian catharsis is not applicable here. I find that Weil’s ending contradicts all the central thrusts of the novel – inexpiable guilt and its antecedent choice-making. That said, the novel, to this moment, is a sensitive, nuanced, and complex exploration of guilt. I shall insist again that this is most importantly an exemplary work of mourning the Shoah loss, not just because it holds, suspended for careful, slow perusal, the representations of catastrophe, but because experiencing the novel is an act of labor that a reader enacts along with Weil as she struggles with the unhealing wound of Waiki’s death and her survival, of her choices to work for the Jewish Council and her willingness to conform with the Nazi’s racial laws and codified humiliations rather than confront and oppose them with the consistent, unwavering moral courage of Antigone. When Antigone, in her dialogue with N, demands that N accept herself, she does not mean that she should forgive herself, but that N must acknowledge what happened, including her choices, and live on as best she can given her wound. Rather than mourning her choices about Waiki, N should mourn Waiki. It is the Jews whose pictures she took in Amsterdam who should be mourned, not N’s having taken their pictures. N must mourn for the dead, not for herself. Here is an example of life circumstances suddenly making a literary text not just significant, but salvific, i.e., the text becomes important for the reader’s psychical wellbeing, for her coping with a particularly disturbing stress or even trauma by giving her a way to think about her experience by stepping into another life for another perspective. Here, the perspectives are Weil’s world being destroyed, of her losing faith in it; so she looks at another whose world was destroyed as a result of making a costly ethical decision. Antigone gave her life for an abstract moral principle that she applied in practical life. She said no to power, and, at that moment, she defined herself, something Weil never felt she accomplished. Aftershocks Grete Weil, Aftershocks: Stories, trans. John Barrett (Boston: Verba Mundi Books/David R. Godine, Publisher, 2008). The publication and revision history of the stories collected in Aftershocks is not straightforward. The Aftershocks collection was published by Godine in 2008 after the German collection, Spatfolgen, which appeared in1992 from Verlag Nagel & Kimche. “Finish What You Started," the oldest item in the Aftershocks collection, was published by Limes Verlag, Wiesbaden in 1968 as part of a collection called Happy, segte der Onkel, which contained the title story from which the collection took its name and which appears in Aftershocks as “A House in the Desert,” which first appeared in German as Erlebnis Weiner Reise in a collection of the same name. In German, “Finish What You Started” was titled B sagen, which sounds phonetically like the verb Besagen, which translates as to say, signify, or mean, although there is no phonetic analogue with the semantic congruence in English, thus “Finish What You Started,” which is a line lifted directly from the translated text.  , The number of quotations in this section makes footnoting each one more of a burden than a help. I proceed deliberately through the text, making it easy for the reader to move from quotation to quotation.     In these stories, Weil still mourns — for a young man’s abandonment of the arts, his repression of his German roots, any mention of the Shoah, and his flight into a bland and bookless American affluent-class existence; for a survivor who dies when she finally returns to Germany and refuses to be touched by German doctors after a violent road accident; and for a Jewish girl drowned in the Seine when she was supposed to be safe in the protection of the woman sworn to hide her. She mourns for Ben, who cannot live on in this world with the wound the Nazis delivered by murdering his wife. She mourns the deaths – first the murder of Ben’s wife, and then Ben’s suicide – as a way of coping by not coping, by not working through it. Perhaps most powerfully, Weil mourns the millennia-long history of human genocidal hatred, the endlessly repeated pattern of slaughter in the name of race, ideology, religion, ethnicity, or geography. And she mourns the moral confusion that results from reasoning that muddles the identities of victims and perpetrators. Weil mourns and mourns and mourns, each story a traversal of the mournable, an enactment of the labor that follows loss if it is, indeed, worked through. The first consideration echoes my notes that opened the earlier discussion of The Bride Price. It bears reprising here as the argument applies to these short stories. I refer to my puzzlement at the paucity of textual analysis in Weil criticism that examines how her stylistic and technical practices (syntax, word choice, voice, tone, metaphor, point of view, dialogue, tense, et al) are inseparable from the stories’ plots and the ideas they explore in that they combine to achieve (or not) the writer's intention. In the story, “The House in the Desert,” for example, the plot map is simple: a survivor visits her aunt and uncle in Los Angeles and important things happen on her way there and after her arrival. Essential aspects of the story occur at her survivor-relatives' house, but an indispensable dimension of the tale is the trek the niece makes from interior Los Angeles. To ignore as part of critical practice the way Weil builds her story is to ignore the reason for reading the literature that emerged from the Holocaust in the first place. Writers often struggle, by the manner in which they engage in representation, to evoke effective responses that are imaginative concomitants of the what happens in a work. In “The House in the Desert,” Weil evokes disorientation and a vivid, eerie other-worldness that prepares the way for what is to come once the narrator reaches her aunt’s and uncle’s home. This inexplicable urban hike is a nano-bildungsroman through which the narrator moves not only from the interior of Los Angeles to the desert beyond, but from a recognizable world across an unmarked border and into a space that is on the other side. It is a place apart in its Otherness, its sense of being a place cut off, a reality reminiscent of survivor experience, discontinuous with a shared reality, utterly isolated, perhaps so isolated that it does not exist in any shared reality. It is language that achieves that sensibility, which carries crucial semantic value in terms of what Weil is trying to convey through the story. And, yet, no critic I consulted attended to this dimension of Weil’s writing. Grete Weil, “A House in the Desert,” in Aftershocks: Stories, trans. John Barrett (Boston: Verba Mundi Books/David R. Godine, Publisher, 2008), 25-44.   All of the Aftershocks stories are robust and satisfying enough to sustain meticulous inquiry. “The Most Beautiful Spot in the World” is short — only two and a half pages, but its elegiacal elegance invites a reader behind the scenes to discover how the thing works. “Don’t Touch Me” is virtually flash fiction within the post-Shoah literature, and “Finish What You Started” is, like “A House in the Desert,” a major short story and demands an especially close reading. All the stories are acts of writing that are also acts of mourning, each in its own way. I will detail Weil’s mourning project in each analysis. I begin with “Guernica."  “Guernica" Weil, “Guernica” in Aftershocks: Stories, trans. John Barrett (Boston: Verba Mundi Books/David R. Godine, Publisher, 2008), 3-15. Weil mourns in this story the loss of a German-Jewish man, Hans, to self-alienation and a life that, while it has a glossy surface, is tailored to help him deny who he is by repressing who he was: German and Jewish. Weil will plumb this theme more deeply in “The House in the Desert.”       The main issues in Guernica are German and Jewish identity, a certain Euro-phobia that manifests in an embarrassingly enthusiastic embrace of American culture and an over-weaning desire to be “an American” — “[a] free citizen in a free country.” Hans is also dogged by guilt that he left Germany early for America where he went to law school while his friends “were tortured and murdered in the camps, . . .” It is Judy, Hans's teenage daughter, who “can’t forgive me for getting away safely before the Holocaust.” Hans stands in the dock every day thanks to Judy’s exuberant misreading, which itself is odd given that her father must have explained the complexities and circumstances. The narrator (hereafter known as N) and Hans were youthful, pre-war friends and have reunited in Manhattan, where he is a big-firm lawyer and lives with his family, for lunch and a chat. N is visiting from Germany and remembers Hans as a devoted young humanist with a wide-ranging knowledge of art. This was a young man who, when he was in hiding before getting out of Germany, “. . . sat on the attic steps . . . writing down the things that moved him most deeply, from which he hoped to be able to give some shape to the future.” However, the man she discovers after they meet in a museum at Picasso’s Guernica is an all-things-German-repressing American patriot with a vapid spouse and a spoiled, TV-watching, disrespectful daughter. Much like the aunt and uncle in “The House in the Desert,” Hans – although he now insists on being called “John” – tries to ape the supposedly American postures he associates with having internalized the American Idea and cleansed himself of his association with Germany. He doesn’t want to be recognized as a German, and, despite his accent, is loathe to speak German to N in public. Hans has turned his back on art and music made after 1933. In fact, N comes to think that 1933 was a catastrophic year for Hans. “The world ended then. His world. Mine, too.” But N found a way to go on as a German. Hans found a way to go on, too, but at the cost of his German self.  The tension between N and Hans escalates from virtually the first moment. Hans arrives looking, as N recalls, “very Jewish, just as he always has, and very German as well.” The last time they were together, Hans dismissed the possibility of Hitler coming to power. “It’s over already,” he said. They look at the Guernica, and the trouble begins. “Do you think it’s beautiful?” he asks her. The query’s impertinence immediately irritates N; it does not help that he asks his question in English. Neither of these behaviors seems like the person she knew, and the person they suggest — someone pretending to be an American – is not appealing to her. Seemingly intent on pissing her off, Hans authorizes himself to carry her “handbag” – a word which is probably an unfortunate translation; it is not her purse, so perhaps it is her city-bag or tote. “It is something men in this country often do, it seems . . .” Regardless, N does not like it. He continues speaking English, and it becomes clear he does not like many of the paintings, which she has difficulty interpreting considering the astuteness he brought to his thinking about art years earlier. “His whole way of looking at them [the paintings] comes purely from his feelings and seems somewhat chaotic.” This implied bias against “feelings” or intuitive response to art suggests that N privileges intellectual or analytical values or habits of mind and that she expected to find them intact in the German-educated Hans. On her way to having her suspicions confirmed, N is taken aback to discover the intensity with which Hans wants to repress and actively conceal his German background. When N gently prods Hans to speak German because her English is not up to his, “[h]e shakes his head vigorously. “I’m not about to speak German here in public.” So great is his intention to become a new person discontinuous with the person he was in Germany that he insisted his German mother learn English in order to communicate with him. “I’m dumbfounded,” N says. “You spoke English to your elderly mother?” He reasoned that English was essential if she wanted to remain in America. “[S]o she had to learn it,” he said. “Your mother had to go into hiding in an occupied country, lost her daughter in Auschwitz, and barely survived herself. And she had to tell all that to you, her only surviving child, in English?” It seems so. They have not even left the museum, and the likelihood of their reunion turning out well is already nil. At a restaurant, Hans insists the hostess speak to them in English. “But you’re German,” the young woman says. “And you’re insolent,” Hans shoots back. It is the consistency of Hans’s insistence on English that N finds confounding. It is a rejection, she understands, as a device to block out the past, anesthetize memory and identity, and pretend that this new self is authentic. Grudgingly, Hans asks about N’s life and work, but complains that her stories set in America, which are the only ones he has read, betray what he regards as an excessive interest in African-Americans’ lives in the United States. Hans says he has jettisoned all concern about blacks’ plight in America. “I gave that up a long time ago,” he says. "My interest is devoted to the Jews, understandably.” N tries to understand the problem: “[S]omething has happened to him, that’s clear to me.” While N does not hold survival against him, she finds something deeply disconcerting about his transformation. “. . . I just have to think about how much you’ve changed,” she says. “Hopefully I have,” he responds, as though admitting that he is trying to reform from a dubious past. Hans is no more sympathetic with N. “Honestly, I don’t understand you,” he says. “The way you go running around that country.” Then, his irritation flares. “The fact is that the Germans killed your husband. Have you forgotten that?” It is an intemperate (or worse) thing to say to the widow of a beloved spouse. For Hans, the fact that Nazis were Germans is only marginally worse than that Germans are Germans. His is a pan-German/Jewish aversion. Weil assembles a scene in Hans’s Manhattan apartment, where they go after lunch to meet his family, that is cringe-worthy. Present are Hans, his wife, just back from the hair salon, Judy, the daughter, and N. Judy has turned off the loud television show but does not leave her chair. Hans introduces N and small-talk ensues followed by Hans asking Judy whether she knows about Picasso. “Uh, some painter or other.” There is some talk about Guernica, which gives Judy an opening to skewer her father about a trivial contradiction. N stands by, quietly observing. “You interrupted our TV program. I want to watch it some more,” Judy demands. A war show is on, and Judy is enamored of the violence, which N thinks could be Viet Nam or Cambodia. “I’m forced to watch,” N writes, “to see the bombs hitting and fire leaping out of the huts . . .” Three adults are held hostage in those moments. “And with every explosion she makes a fist with her right hand and smacks it against the outstretched palm of her left hand,” she writes of Judy. The sense of claustrophobia, everyone walking on eggshells, and the ambience of bombs exploding and huts burning is too much to bear. During the pitched TV battle, N hears "the horse from Guernica screaming in its death agony.” Her misery is all but unendurable. “I’d like to hold my ears shut even though I know it wouldn’t do any good.” The combination of her distress in these uncomfortable moments, combined with N’s incredulity at Hans’s transformation, makes for a high-tension crisis moment that is defused when Hans suggests they repair to his study. “There’s no art anymore,” he says. There are several more crossed swords during the denouement — the role of the writer (“. . . we have the accursed responsibility of telling people what’s really going on in the world and that human beings are murderers.”); Hans's thinking about America as “God’s own country; the need for armies; and the possibility of an afterlife. Hans asks N if she believes in God. “No, John, I don’t. Never believed in God. If I had, I probably would have stopped after Auschwitz and Hiroshima.” Hans is appalled. “I love life very much,” he says, and reminds N that, “You’ll die unconsoled.” N sees that one coming. It is consistent, yet ironic, that N mourns for a self-alienated German, but would not think of mourning for her own prospective death. “I’ll die with the certainty that for me it’s finally, finally all over, that I’m entering the world of nothingness, where there’s no Hiroshima, no Auschwitz, and no Guernica.” "Don’t Touch Me" Weil, “Don’t Touch Me,” in Aftershocks: Stories, 19-21. Esther is an Auschwitz survivor. She lives in New York, is happy there and feels at home. Against her better judgment, she travels to Germany to visit her cousin, Rosa, who came through the war by hiding in Berlin; she stayed on afterward. That the sisters chose to live in different places — one of them in America — is hardly the only difference between them. Rosa’s boyfriend, whom Esther thinks is “repulsive,” gets into a serious car accident while driving Esther and Rosa around, presumably in Berlin. The boyfriend, to whom Esther takes an immediate dislike, and Rosa are not seriously hurt, but Esther is badly injured. At the hospital, though, she refuses to let doctors touch her; the gentlest hand provokes screams. After three days of this, she dies. “Don’t Touch Me” is only two and a half pages, but its length conceals its gravitas. This is a story about what Weil, in Antigone, calls the ultimate form of protest — the power to say no, even when doing so may be foolish or have lethal consequences. No, I won’t fight. No, I won’t work for a napalm maker. No, I won’t be fodder for a dictator’s machine. No, I won’t live in a right-to-work state. No, I will not conform to my so-called demographic’s behaviors. Et cetera. A reader may be forgiven for impatiently thinking Esther’s choice untenable. But that would be without considering how Esther may, especially in a state of shock, parse being subject to others’ power when in so vulnerable a condition, especially if those others are Germans. She survived Auschwitz; she knows the meaning and experience of vulnerability, which follows from the perception of having less power than another (or others) in a relationship and thus being in a position to be manipulated. The perception of physical vulnerability inheres in any arrangement wherein there is contact of one person’s body with that of another; whether the bodies are those of lovers, doctors, or camp guards, power configurations accrue. Even benign and healing touches are attempts to control and manipulate the body. “Arms to your side.” “Don’t move as we slide you into the tube.” “Breathe.” “Don’t breathe.” Esther knew Auschwitz as a site of totalitarian control over her body. There was no safety, no capacity to defend, to preserve personal autonomy. The body could, at someone’s whim, be bloodied, maimed, experimented on, and worse, or abandoned to its own capacity for decay and implosion. It follows that a hysterical touch aversion can follow this kind of malevolence. After Auschwitz, Esther was absolute in her exercise of the power of the scream to ensure that no one ever again colonized her body. Especially not Germans. “Don’t Touch Me,” then, is about the freedom of non-compliance, about the moral imperative to make choices that are self-defining and come at a price. Perhaps Weil admires Esther; she sees in Esther a woman who chose irrationally, but she chose.  Narratively, the piece is unusual in that the voice cuts from first to third person at precisely the moment when continuing the first person would become problematic as a matter of craft. The first person dominates until the car accident, and the third deftly takes over for some, but not all, of the time afterward. So adroit is the move that the shift is easy to miss. It is this short period when Esther is not at the narrative controls that is intriguing. The injured Esther cannot maintain continuous narration, so a third-person shift should be expected, e.g., “Then a crash and everything goes black.” “The doctor goes on, softly, ‘Don’t be afraid. No one’s going to do anything to you.’” Esther is conscious here, but her narration does not return until the doctor gives up trying to persuade her to receive care. Esther begins re-narrating from her point of view with, “So I’m dying, maybe. Done in by a German, fifty years later. Not bad at all. Makes some sense out of the whole business.” It would not have rung true for Esther to describe her iterative refusals to be touched or her adamant opposition to being rolled into the CAT-scan machine. “They are taking me to a machine and want to put me in it! I’m terrified of the gas! The gas! And I scream, “Noooo!” The effect would have been hysterical and forced and would have ruined the whole. Weil outsources to an external narrator that part of the story’s continuity that would otherwise undermine the credibility of Esther’s point of view. The balance of the story belongs to Esther until the last short paragraph about her death. "The House in the Desert" Weil, “A House in the Desert,” in Aftershocks: Stories, 25-44. While “The House in the Desert” shares top billing with “Finish What You Started” as the collection’s most significant works, the former has received the most attention. When this story first appeared in German, Martin Gregor-Devlin, writing in the Suedwestfunk, called the collection “one of the most exciting America (sic) books of recent times, one of the most relentless, most differentiated and honest descriptions of American live (sic) that I have ever seen.” “The House in the Desert” was undoubtedly one of the major reasons for the strong notice because its subject is the most thoroughly American of the lot and its telling is the most vivid and unpredictable. In a letter to Gregor-Devlin, Weil expressed her thanks for being the lone voice among critics who discerned what she was actually writing about. She told him that ". . .  you are apparently the only person who noticed that I was primarily trying to write something about America.” Stephen Braese, "Grete Weil's America: A Self-Encounter at the Moment of the Anti-Authoritarian Revolt," The Germanic Review 75, no. 2 (March 1, 2000): 144. Originally published in Germany as "Happy, sagte der Onkel," or "Happy, Said the Uncle," the story appeared in 1968 as the student movement – what Braese calls "the anti-authoritarian revolt” Braese, 132. – was gaining in intensity in both Europe and the United States. The story occurs through temporal and spatial dimensions, i.e., during the time it takes the narrator/protagonist (hereafter known as N), a tourist from Germany, a survivor, to walk to her aunt’s and uncle’s house outside Los Angeles. Her route is up Wilshire and Hollywood boulevards, starting out deep in the city and eventually passing into the desert, even though that is not possible outside a writer’s imagination. Two cabbies, one white, the other black (which becomes important), refuse to pick her up when given the address. Their reasons are not clear, but their abandoning the protagonist to an absurdly long walk augers ill for the strenuous, disorienting, and increasingly bizarre journey ahead.  The walk is exhausting. N is fatigued early on; it remains puzzling why she makes no further effort to find an alternative to this impossible walk. “My feet hurt, I was hungry and thirsty. I had a cup of coffee in a drugstore and when I came out, the fog was there.” Just as the space through which N moves along the road is a spatial fabulation, the fog is uncanny and seems motivated to defeat her, if not kill her. “. . . [G]ray strands wrapped themselves around my head, neck, and legs until, eventually, I was completely encased in thick cotton wadding.” She continues, nonetheless — this is a trek of suffering — because her aunt and uncle expect her for this first meeting in three decades. N does not particularly care for this couple, but she has sympathy because they lost everything in Europe during the war. The fog worsens; she refers to the air as being filled with “billows of poison gas." She touched earlier on Los Angeles’ smog problem, but the reference to gas in a story about Holocaust survivors is ominous, especially when linked to “. . . alone, vulnerable, . . .” Foreshadowing the jarring American patriotic jingoism that N later discovers has become part of her aunt’s and uncle’s routine discourse, N recalls their letters as routinely including rhetoric about “God’s own country, lucky to be an American citizen, freedom.” It emerges that N wants to do more than just touch base with long-lost family: she is curious. “What were they doing with their freedom? Why hadn’t they ever written about the dead?” “. . . Why did they kill the dead with their silence?” Many family members were lost in the Shoah, including N’s parents. Yet, from her aunt and uncle, nothing. The fog disappears as N walks, improbably, into the desert, unsure whether she is still on the right street. It is sunset, and the landscape, which seems to have agency over the show it puts on, comes alive in a light-show display that resonates with the notion of America-as-spectacle. “Now the Siamese cat [the desert’s color reminds N of a Siamese cat] began to glow. It produced colors in its belly, they squirted out of its fur: bright red fountains, falling down into shimmering purple, then forming salmon pink, brick red, tomato-red puddles, violet and sienna and umber around the edges. Covered with silver netting.”  Just as she walks out of the earlier fog, now she walks out of the magic. “[T]he magic ended, the desert was once again the beige-gray Siamese cat and when even the beige disappeared, it was as gray as all cats are at night; and after a while there was no cat at all, just impenetrable darkness.” There now come two of the most extraordinary pages in all of Weil that not only demonstrate her power as a writer, but exemplify what is possible in the best literature to emerge from the Holocaust. As Weil shows, serious literature lets a writer struggle to convey the sensibilities of people who were torn out of their shared realities and rendered desolate, inconsolable, and beyond the reach of anything that may look like the reality and humanity they knew. Here, Weil works by indirection; she does not look directly at The Thing and report what she sees, but conjures an entirely Other dimension and allows the narrator to experience and report on that space — what it feels like, how it looks, how it makes her feel, or how it distorts vision, and, far from opening up her reality, it challenges her sanity. The narrator’s account of the journey from this point, i.e., on entering the desert and finding "the magic gone," is ominous, eerie, otherworldly and disorienting. Weil conjures an increasingly vertiginous experience of a landscape into which she is burrowing deeper and deeper but that ceases to be recognizable; the narrator (and the reader) must navigate it nonetheless. Her aunt and uncle lie somewhere out there in the night’s black. The first sentence of this section uses a simple dependent clause to announce the threshold that has been crossed. “Somewhere in infinite space, close by or far away, in front or in back of me, a dog barked.” It is nothing less than cosmic; if Weil deploys the term infinite space, that is what she means. This is no longer a reality that is continuous with the one the narrator may have known when she arrived in Los Angeles. So, the sun is setting. Weil could simply have written that. But her technicolor language accesses the bizarre-ness of the experience; there is the possibility of trying to see what the narrator is trying to see and understand the way she sees it. She experiences it vividly – frighteningly so.  The lists that are going on here, first the inventory of the desert’s spectacles as the light dies, then the list of superlatives make it clear that this is an American desert – America, where big things happen. “The biggest, the greatest, the most wonderful.” Then, in rapid-fire succession, the staples of the commercial American landscape parade across the stage: “skyscrapers nor bridges, nor concert halls, nor hospitals, nor department stores, nor supermarkets, . . .” The momentum that is gathering has a manic quality. N declares none of the country’s wonders can compete with the desert show. Suddenly, subito pianissimo. The light cuts out. “Just impenetrable darkness.” Now, following the apex of the walk’s narrative arc, there is a sense of floating. Weil has led the way into this carnival of sensory pleasure that ended in the phantasmagoria and then plunged into darkness. The pacing and rhythm of Weil’s text are extraordinary: a crescendo to a fortissimo, then subito piano. What was exhilaration now is fear. The reader is returned to a point no more transcendent that when the neice first looked out over the desert and its vast cluelessness. The featureless desert is still there and just as inaccessible. It can’t be parsed.  The niece is stranded; she shares this reality with no one. She won’t be able to convey what she has seen and felt to anyone, which certainly carries a resonance with trauma. Then Weil invokes the eeriness of the lost and the dangers that may lie in the dark. This is just darkness. Like the desert colors were just sunset. But not just. The words “infinite space” deepen the sense of floating, of disorientation, of loss of agency. So there’s more at work than indicating it is night in the desert. The dog is barking, but the narrator cannot tell where the bark is coming from. The places where it could be sourced are impossibly disparate. It cannot be close and far away. The parameters that are essential for any organism to protect itself depend on knowing where it is, knowing what is near and what is far, and, moreover, how near is near, and how far is far. Without those basic coordinates, a creature is helpless, untethered, lost in what may as well be the madness-inducing, Conradian oceanic. Weil then deepens the sense of lostness and peril. The dog howls, which causes the narrator to remember there may be jackals about. She cannot recall whether jackals are aggressive and carnivorous or just puny scavengers. Another sign of lostness – she can’t know where she is, and now she cannot tell whether she is safe. She yearns for some grounding. It is heartbreaking: “. . . I was afraid in the way you’re afraid of something when you’re a child, without really knowing what it is. You’d like to sneak off somewhere, crawl into a dark cave, have a wall you can touch, hear a comforting voice or one that scolds you, any voice will do . . .” But, nothing, not yet. She must continue this neice-trek. The threshold questions at this moment become, a.) how will Weil thread this narrative forward such that it maintains credibility as it is not yet entirely clear whether a border has been crossed into a fantastical landscape that the narrator simply describes or whether something else is going on, i.e., delusion, hallucination, psychosis. Six pages of dense narrative into the story, a reader remains disoriented, which is Weil's intent. A candle appears in the darkness. This is the desert, and a candle appears, “[t]he small, flickering glow of a candle." For the narrator, the candle becomes a beacon, not an artifact having no particular relationship with her. There is a hush, a silence, an aural vacuum. The dog is silent; only the candle is present, and it is off in “infinite space,” in the “impenetrable darkness.” The narrator stops and wonders why she would place any trust in the beneficence of this light — why she might be so swift to think it may be for her.  “My confidence was curious,” the narrator recalls. "I didn’t understand it. Since when had I trusted people? Since when had I not trusted them? Since I’d realized that they were murderers, or even before that?”  With “murderers,” another boundary is encountered, but this time, it is the reader’s turn to cross. If there was ever any doubt that something more than the narrator being caught out at night without a lantern is actually going on, it cannot be sustained. This is the first moment in the text that signals something grave is at hand. If a reader picked up this story and did not know anything of its writer or that the story is suspended in the shadow of the Reich’s hell pit, this “murderers” should initiate a shudder at the prospect of a mammoth, inverted ice mountain lurking beneath the not-so-significant chunk of ice above water, i.e., the stumbling around in the night. The text’s density thickens. “The light – where was it coming from?” Speculation follows. So oddly, the narrator settles in to consider that it may have something to do with a chicken coop and there follows an extended riff on chickens. “Unlimited possibilities for running around, scratching; how the sand must go flying up in the air! Where else in the world were chickens permitted to find such fulfillment in scratching?” Now, the narrator’s mind is racing, almost certainly terrified. She comically deep-dives into the chicken-coop explanation for the light and tries to imagine what a coop may be like, including the salve that its opportunities for unlimited scratching would likely be for chickens’ minds. This is crazy, but Weil traces the unpredictable thought-routes that fevered minds take when intensely stressed and wildly grasping for answers to questions about what is going on and whether they are safe. Weil calmly follows the narrator’s cognitive paths, first into the chicken coop, then into a black family’s hut that may be off in the dark with a candle burning in the window. Here commences the resonance with “Guernica’s” Hans who told N that her stories seem preoccupied with African-Americans. Acutely aware of African-Americans’ persecution, Weil makes a telling, unexpected, leap into African-Americans’ situation in the United States: the light, her narrator speculates, could be coming from a black family’s desert hut. This thought becomes more transparent given that the story’s provenence is the late 1960s when Weil made no secret of her admiration for the “anti-authoritarian” movement, i.e., the student riots and anti-Viet Nam war protests in North America and Europe and the civil-rights movement in the United States. The next paragraph establishes the narrator’s affinity for vulnerable and persecuted African-Americans in 1960s America. “If I were a black person and lived in this country,” she writes, "I’d rather live in the desert than in a city.” The affinity is her familiarity with persecution, with running and hiding from her would-be murderers. “Even with the risk that my chances of getting away would be very small if things really got bad.” It is remarkable how fast and effortlessly Weil uses the simple disjunctive, “but,” to instantly turn from a comedic riff on chicken coops in the desert to the gravely serious matter of African-Americans’ civil-rights. In just four, average-length sentences, Weil deepens her narrator’s affinity to a level of life-and-death seriousness. The first sentence raises the idea that the light could be sourced in a black family’s dwelling, as bizarre as that may seem in the desert: “But, it could be . . .”. The second sentence establishes the affinity: “If I were a black person and lived in this country . . .” The third sentence deals with the shared experience of risk and probability of capture: “Even with the risk that my chances of getting away would be very small if things really got bad.” The narrator then brings the full import of her experience to bear on the blacks’ situation by establishing her authority to speak of persecution: “I knew about running away and hiding, that I’d learned – five years were long enough to become an expert.” There are no desert-hut-dwelling blacks, of course. In lesser hands, this detour could seem a forced human-rights polemic. It is redeemed by Weil having already set up the narrator’s phantasmagorical perceptions, so there is little reason to be surprised when otherwise jolting references to chickens and blacks appear in the desert’s “infinite space” that still awaits the delineation necessary for the narrator to continue her walk. But Weil is not ready to proceed just yet; instead, she harvests the semantic energy of the “five years” allusion and flows it into a new paragraph. “Only five years?” the narrator now asks, as if in response to the question, “So, that five years was a long time ago and you’re still suffering it?” The answer follows. “As if you could simply put aside a habit that had gotten into your very fiber.” Just as she pivoted from the silent, invisible desert to chickens to blacks in the previous paragraph with a simple, “but,” here she picks up narrative energy by swiftly invoking the body. No set-up is necessary; the line’s tension is maintained. Weil somatizes the experience of flight and then deepens it.  “Once a body’s picked up momentum, it doesn’t just stop suddenly.” There follows a long sentence that defends the continued presence of the traumatic experience in the narrator's viscera. Just because there are no Gestapo agents waiting to demand identification or showing up in the middle of the night, she explains, and just because the camps have been turned into education centers through which school children now pour to look at victims’ teeth and hair that are in displays instead of attached to bodies, that does not mean “there’s no reason to run away any more.” Weil could have ended the paragraph here; instead, she takes a sudden plunge straight toward the intersection of trauma and language in “Auschwitz.” “The running away goes on. Running from the name.” The representation of a place of horror with a label causes the horror to inhere in that noun, and the noun’s life goes on and on. In “Auschwitz,” the noun acquires seemingly eternal life; the thing Auschwitz operated in the world at one time, and that it was implies that it could be again. So, not only does the historical horror of Auschwitz inhere in “Auschwitz,” the potential for a future Auschwitz does, too. Weil crafts it as, “Running away from the name.” The time before both Auschwitz and “Auschwitz” is construed by Weil as, “[w]hen Auschwitz wasn’t yet a name . . .” There is no running from unnamed evil; it is logically impossible except in psychiatric pathologies, although there is a case that some among the mad are simply more aware of incipient Evil than the not-mad. On the whole, though, humans are naming creatures; they reflexively put labels on things tangible and intangible so as to manipulate them physically and symbolically. Once there was Auschwitz, and, therefore, “Auschwitz,” though, “[w]ho’s going to take the name back?” Weil’s narrator asks. The dreaded genie is out of the bottle, the thing and its life-ever-after name were. Therefore, they are: “The running away goes on. Running away from the name.” So far, this is nothing if not terrifying — the living-dead going about in nouns — but it so far only glances on the personal. Weil waits until the paragraph’s penultimate sentence to drive the point home; with quavering voice, her narrator asks, “Who’s going to tell me it’s not my hair, my teeth?” Writing with the power of grave moral insistence on the intimate monstrosity of real-world horror that has devastating, real-world consequences that she has witnessed, the narrator says, “They meant it for me.” In the next paragraph, Weil levels off after swiftly climbing to this high altitude. She still does not return to the walk narrative, the last node of which was her narrator's noticing the light in the distance and speculating about its source. Weil’s project now is to apply the moral force that the narrator has brought to bear on the question of post-Holocaust “flight” to the crisis of incipient authoritarian reaction to protests about civil rights, the Viet Nam war, and, more broadly, a generation of students questioning established authority. She doubles back to her earlier subject of race, but, now, having already broached it, Weil causes it to explicitly resonate in sympathy with the kind of persecution she experienced. She is not interested in splitting hairs over the analogy’s exact precision – African-Americans are not analogues of Europe’s Jews, but there were alarmingly recognizable patterns of abuse and persecution: demonization, dehumanization, denial of civil liberties, white-on-black attacks, social discrimination, the deployment of police, and the use of state power to surveil so-called threats. She first must navigate a transition. The last thought in the narrative was Weil’s insistence that Auschwitz was “meant for” her as a Jew and that “Auschwitz” lives on, in, and with her, and it implores her to keep running. And to mourn. So, she is deeply embedded in Holocaust memory, and she has to flow that energy into what her narrator calls the American “race problem.” Her bridge is a sentence that links the already established motif of “running and hiding” with the civil-rights crisis in America. She begins with the front end of a sentence that is straight from her sphere of experience: “Having to run away too late or too early . . .” Here is the fear – anxiety that flight may suddenly become necessary even though her friends assure her that such a choice, i.e., running away late, early, or at all, is hardly something to worry about in the United States. The idea of running is from the old world; that the idea is unthinkable “here” is thoroughly American. But the back end of the sentence places Weil clearly where she needs to be in her narrative: “. . . it’ll never get that bad, my friends tell me[;] that’s unthinkable in God’s own world.” The hook that pulls the back end of the sentence into Weil’s narrator’s presence is “my friends.” “[I]t’ll never get that bad, my friends tell me . . .” Then those friends “drive me around their cities and we go through poor streets where no Whites live, . . .” The narrator is remembering being driven through a big American city. The predictable narrative path here would be a description of sad, maybe outrageous, urban conditions, but, instead, Weil’s narrator turns on her “friends” who would like to censor what she sees all the while talking about how “[l]ots of things have gotten better already, but it’s not possible to solve the race problem from one day to the next.” These friends are supposedly “tolerant and progressive,” yet they use a rhetoric of gradualism mastered by southern reactionary politicians who warned that stability required moving slowly to implement civil-rights laws, including voting rights. The narrator finds this language among her progressive acquaintances. “You have to start from below, during the first years in school,” goes the rhetoric. "Slowly, very slowly.” Despite this seeming reactionary stance, the narrator provides some perspective on the actual depth of reactionary U.S. thought: the people who hold these views would likely earn themselves the label of “nigger lovers” “down south.” An accusation of being a “Jew lover” in Germany and German-occupied lands could be lethal.  Dismissing these liberal friends – and ending this dense interlude in the walking narrative – the neice/narrator condemns the lot by claiming that they are pushing “the problem away from themselves and onto their children.” The balance of the story is both grave and comic in a fashion not found elsewhere in Weil. The end is near-slapstick farce, so the analytical challenge is to map how Weil reaches pathetic hilarity from this dark moment exploring American racism. The narrative thread picks up with the niece arriving, finally, at her aunt’s/uncle’s home. Having continued walking, she finds herself standing by the candle itself. “I’d gotten so close to the candle that I could smell it,” which made her think of thickly scented candle stores in American shopping malls. These stores, she says, "are [t]he very essence of the grand world, with a hint of dissipation.” It is not a sarcastic comment, as there is nothing in the text to suggest that sarcasm is in the niece’s nature, but an observation of the kind of thing routinely found in America —stores that commodify the exotic and sell it back to people. Oddly, she had passed through no walls, walked through no door. She never entered the house, yet she never did not enter the house, either. She is simply inside a place where there is no inside and outside. “[T]here was nothing but air and sand. Only after I’d circled the spot illuminated by the candle and returned to the point where I’d started did I realize that furniture, just simply furniture, was standing there in the desert, without a room, without a house.” She is taken aback to discover that the furniture belonged to her parents and another aunt and uncle who perished. “[T]wo bony hands grabbed me by my shoulders and a face was pressed against mine. I could feel bristly hairs around the mouth that kissed me . . .” The niece encounters her aunt and uncle, bizarre creatures, both of them, the aunt with a sprouted face and her “snow-white hair twisted into a knot.” With his “sunken face and the deep fissures around a mouth that had been pressed into an unfamiliar shape by his dentures,” her uncle, wearing a brocade house jacket, looked like “he was off to a masquerade ball . . .” They were grotesqueries who, by turns, were gracious and condemnatory hosts, quarreling and caring spouses, crude cheerleaders for a picture-postcard America, and harsh critics and sentimental adorers of Germany. The niece’s short visit is a roller-coaster ride during which she is praised as “'just so clever’” and verbally thrashed — “Shut up, shut up right now, you nasty person. Just look what you’ve done!” What she had “done” was cause her uncle Maxie to commence coughing violently by answering her aunt, who declaimed that she, the narrator, could not “begin to imagine all that went on there,” that, “Yes, I can, Auntie. They murdered her [the niece’s mother] in Auschwitz.” Weil’s description of how the space felt once the word was uttered is not to be missed. “The name hovered in the room without walls, filled it, trickled out into the desert, an explosive that I’d dragged along with me from the other end of the world, in order to set it off here.” The reference to the “name” “Auschwitz” recalls the earlier discussion of Auschwitz the place and Auschwitz the name. Here, it is the “name” from which the aunt and uncle shrink and flee. “‘We don’t want to talk about that,’” said my uncle and stopped coughing. “That word doesn’t even cross our lips,” chimes in the aunt. “We’re not as heartless as you are . . .” The aunt wonders how the niece can live in Germany and suggests that anyone [read: any Jew] who can live there must have forgotten all that happened. This violent slap-down of the supposedly unmentionable is followed by the aunt and uncle spouting a rapid-fire set of vapid claims – the first of several – that foreshadow the farce to come.      “Those you-know-whats [Nazis] are bad," said my uncle      "The Americans are good," said my aunt.      Uncle: "Democrats."      Aunt: "Nothing like that can happen here.” It is in this moment that the story begins to take on the qualities of a play, with the aunt and uncle allied physically and rhetorically against their niece, stage center. “[T]hey both said, ‘We don’t want to know anything about it.’” There is the rhythm of two comedians’ patter about this exchange. “We don’t want to know anything about it.” The other: “We don’t want to know anything about it.” The two elders are unwitting clowns and becoming more clownish. Just as the niece is wondering if there is any way to go forward after the “Auschwitz” bomb, another phantasmagoric event, reminiscent of sundown in the desert, overtakes the three “actors.” “[S]uddenly everything began to change, dissolve into light and shadow, mild, uniform light and deep, bizarre darkness. Heavy became light, the table appeared to be floating, the sofa on which we were sitting, my aunt’s chair, her hair — all took on the silver gleam of the domes of Saint Mark’s. The featureless had taken on features, a desert style born of moonlight.” The moon has risen, and it reminds the niece of how far she is from home here in California. “The moon wasn’t . . . the friendly moon from home, but a gleaming, open bowl.” It had to feel all the more odd given that the niece is sitting on her parents’ and other murdered relatives’ furniture in the open desert, no roof over her head, illuminated by this desertscape-creating moonlight. This was "[a] foreign moon, hanging strangely in a foreign place. For the first time, I realized how far away from Europe I was.” Uncle Maxie quotes Goethe and gets it wrong, and there follows the second instance of a comedic patter, this one more intense than the first.      “'He’s educated, your uncle,' said my aunt."      “‘If you’re educated, you know the world,’ said my uncle."      “‘We went to Venice for our honeymoon,’ said my aunt."      “‘Saint Mark’s Square,’ said my uncle.      “‘You can’t know everything,” said my aunt . . ."      “'And there,’ said my uncle, where “there” is Germany. It’s snap, snap, snap, snap. Short, alternating bursts of philistinism. There follows another riff, this time on the beauties of Bavaria, and, after that, on the virtues of Munich, the home of the Nazi movement. Into the midst of this enthusiasm for Germany, which they have already made clear is unlivable because of history, there drop three short sentences that pick up the thread of enthusiasm for America that originated in an earlier patriotic riff by aunt and uncle:      “We are Americans,” said my aunt.      Uncle: “Americans."      Aunt: “Citizens."      Uncle: “Of this free country."      Aunt: “Here you don’t even need to register with the police."      Uncle: “That’s freedom." The patter continues in this vein. Weil picks up this performance's energy in lines that the aunt and uncle seem to rap out for their niece.      ["America" or "Southern California"] is "[a] glücklich country where there’s no snow,” said my uncle.      “Happy, yelled my aunt, “not glücklich, happy."      “Ja, happy,” said my uncle. “That’s what we always say, we’re happy here but not glücklich." That is, the couple is happy and they intend to use the English word for the emotion, not glücklich, which reeks of a time and place they have put behind them in their determination to be Americans and assume new lives that are discontinuous with what came before, including the language they use to describe it. The intensity, hilarity, farce, and ugliness escalate from here as an extended back-and-forth exchange of vagaries and ideolgisms about their New World. Aunt: “People like each other here."       “‘Everyone’s friendly to everyone else,’ said my uncle.”       “Neighbors help each other, the rich help the poor, the white help . . ." Sudden stop. The patter runs directly into American racism. Astonishingly, the couple take the deep dive into the muck of American racist rhetoric as they so strenuously try to prove their American-ness. They can even be racists — those who were victims of racism — to seem American. “‘The blacks are lazy and dumb,’ said my aunt.” Her uncle hangs back a bit, not quite comfortable with where this is going, then he caves.  “‘It would be better if they were sent back to Africa,’ said my aunt."       “‘America for the Americans!’ yelled my uncle." Now the story insists on being a farce. The aunt wraps herself in an American flag. Uncle jumps to his feet and salutes. Aunt worries that Maxie is becoming too excited and may start coughing. “Don’t get sick on me,” she tells him. Then it all crumbles of its own weight. There is a lull; Maxie realizes that only the wealthy in America can afford to get sick while health care was universally available “over there.” The aunt jumps in to say that they did not feel like numbers in Europe while, in America, people are “[j]ust a number on a conveyor belt.” The last time the niece spoke, she blew up the visit with “Auschwitz.” Now, perhaps in spite, she does it again. “Elizabeth and Eugene [her parents] were numbers when they got sent to the gas.” The response is instant. “‘Be quiet, you heartless person!’ hissed my aunt. ‘Do you have to keep on talking about it?’" The aunt and uncle in unison now: “‘We don’t want to know anything about it!’"       “We are Americans.”  Uncle comes unglued after he ticks off machines and inventions and gadgets in which America is awash on his way to making some other point, but mentions “chirping machines,” which the aunt vehemently denies exist in America. Another intense patter, this time between the aunt and uncle. “‘There are so chirping machines!’"     “‘There are no chirping machines.’" “‘There are so chirping machines, there are, there’s everything here." It goes on, getting louder and louder, each insisting on the existence or otherwise of chirping machines, until uncle starts chirping himself. “‘Chirping machines!’ screamed my uncle. ‘Chirp . . . chirp . . . chirp . . .’ He couldn’t go on talking; he was shaken by a fit of coughing." The aunt and uncle are reduced to children quarreling over nonsense; their niece leaves, disappearing into the California desert night. The story raises difficult questions about how Jews who found their way to the United States during or after the war wanted to think about their new country, how they related to it, and how they, as immigrant German-American Jews, thought of themselves in relation to Europe and to What Happened. Perhaps America became a place to hide and forget, to take up the country’s ethos of success – and sometimes its racism and other sadnesses – and drown out the screams and memories and devastations. The aunt and uncle here are alienated from themselves and cut off — by distance if nothing else — from things German. These are German Jews who survived hell to land in Southern California and are trying to convince themselves that all is well, that they are happy, and, by pushing the past away, by banishing language that taps into horrific memories, they can start afresh without Nazi stench clinging to them. They cannot, and that is just one of the things that Weil mourns here. The act of writing this story may well be understood as an act of mourning: Weil mourns German Jews’ loss of identity as they fled their homeland or opted not to return; she mourns the dreadful association of the language of Goethe with terror and the assaults upon it by murderous technocrats. And she mourns the trivialities of American culture that carried out their own assault on the sensibilities of German Jews who, many of whom, like Weil, were sophisticated and steeped in the humane traditions of German intellectual life. Dropped into places like Southern California, where the narrator’s uncle and aunt lived, they were defenseless and besieged by “automobiles, radios, televisions, incubators, refrigerators, iron lungs, artificial kidneys . . .” On top of it all, they still faced anti-Semitism. Germany was a terrible place to be for post-Shoah Jews, as I discuss elsewhere. It was inconceivable that home, and all that meant, could ever be home again. The land was rife with the sordid spoils of Nazi propaganda, and emigres found it in their new country, as well. The notion of exile recurs: the mourned-for occupy a space that is separated to a greater or lesser extent from everyday reality. Loss looms large, perspective suffers, human agency is doubted, and self-confidence is shaken, as is the capacity to trust anyone anywhere. As the niece says, “Since when had I trusted people? Since when had I not trusted them? Since I’d realized that they were murderers, or even before that?” As pathetic and stunted as are the aunt and uncle, they occupy this space. They are at home, as it were, but there is no real home for them. Even the rudimentary elements of home — walls, a roof, a door, windows – are missing. They float in the space of the Siamese-cat-colored desert in a house that is not a house, a structureless phantasm that has no borders that allow for some control over ingress, egress, or basic personal sovereignty. They are in a new country, but, despite their enthusiasms and efforts to ape the atavistic, crude rhetoric of reactionary America, they are not at home and never can be, no matter how many times they cry out, “We are Americans.” Grete Weil mourns for them.  "Little Sonja Rosenkranz" Weil, “Little Sonia Rosenkranz,” in Aftershocks: Stories. 47-56. “Little Sonja Rosenkranz” is set in Paris during and after the war. It is about a young Jewish woman — her age is never made clear, but she is old enough to have a boyfriend, so probably a teenager, 15, 16, or so — who is entrusted by the Sonja’s father, Heinz, to the care of the protagonist, Marthe Besson. Besson cannot hide the girl because of her ties to the Resistance, so, she, Besson, in turn entrusts Sonja to one Blanche Molitier, a journalist, along with a large package of money that Molitier is asked to keep for Sonja when she is older. Later, Besson learns that Sonja has drowned in the Seine, especially odd given that she is supposed to be in hiding. Madame Molitier is unwilling to talk with Besson and eventually drops out of sight altogether. After the war, the memory of Sonja and the mystery of what happened obsesses Besson, and she makes intense, frantic efforts to discover the truth. She even tracks down Molitier, who has grown into an older woman and gained renown as a distinguished journalist. Besson is convinced that Molitier stole Sonja’s money, although Marthe has no proof to back up her suspicion, and an accusation that Molitier did anything to harm Sonja is groundless. When buttonholed on the street many years after the incident by Besson, Molitier will only ask, “You mean that little brat who snuck off one foggy night?” She, Molitier, had to leave, she explains, because Sonja knew Molitier’s name and address and could give her away to the Gestapo. Pressed about the money, “. . . Molitier rubbed her hand across her eyes. ‘I can’t really remember.’" Besson hits an impasse. The narrator observes that, “[s]he would probably never find out and nothing more could be gotten out of Blanche Molitier.” Then comes Marthe’s liberation. Yet another friend – she has lost most friends because of her quixotic search for answers about Sonja’s death — tells her to drop the matter. But this person goes further. “Don’t spend so much time thinking about it, Marthe dear — after all, thanks to your efforts Sonja was saved from the concentration camp.” The argument caught Marthe by surprise, and she stopped to think again about her responsibility to Sonja. Martha plans a trip that will take her from concentration camp to concentration camp seeking an answer to the question of whether the camps would have been worse than a death in the Seine. Local newspapers expressed interest in running any reports that Marthe cared to write and bring back. “She looked at everything with the same horror that comes over every visitor and reported about it all without failing to mention each time that the concentration camp was surely the worst thing that had ever been inflicted on a human being."  Marthe was satisfied that death in a camp would have been far the worst fate. After that, “the slightly limping figure of little Sonja Rosenkranz paled more and more and finally found a resting place . . . in the sad company of those countless, promising young people who had died before their time, . . ." Weil cannot mean this. The story ends in peace and resolution, and Weil is not about offering peace and resolution to anyone over Holocaust deaths. The ending that has Marthe finally tranquil is a faux tableaux, an intentional blue-sky conclusion that satirizes the sad but, “oh, well, it cannot be helped” Holocaust story. Weil writes from the site of the wound and inveighs against the ethics of healing narratives and suggests that the difficult, unresolved path of mourning and memory is the only approach that has ethical and intellectual integrity. A close reading of what Weil writes about Marthe is the key to understanding the satire. There are two things that most concern Marthe: her overwhelming sense of guilt and the need for consolation. She is not nearly as interested in justice for Sonja as she is in finding peace for herself. She reproves herself for not having kept Sonya with her, although that was a practical impossibility. She anguishes over why she did not find out more about Blanche Molitier before leaving Sonja with her. Marthe is fiercely committed to clearing her conscience. Almost certainly, Marthe would not have been as distressed had Sonja died, in the Seine or elsewhere, had she, Marthe, not been responsible for her well-being. She does not accept that her responsibility for Sonja ended when she handed the child over to Molitier. That is admirable, but Marthe knows she did not check on the girl after handing her off. Neither did she pursue the matter at the time Sonja died, which would have been challenging given that the girl had been in hiding, but she could have pressed Molitier harder. More than anything, Marthe wanted to be free from the guilt that dogged her. Again, Weil’s guilt is aired and questioned, as in The Bride Price and Antigone, by pulling her own narrative through Marthe’s. She finally discovers, thanks to her friend, the but-you-saved-her-from-the-camps argument. It cannot be sustained. Its first faulty premise is that death was Sonja’s inevitable outcome. It was not; the idea that there should ever have been a choice between drowning or being gassed is preposterous. The second faulty premise, that she was better off drowning in Paris rather than “being driven naked through what they called ‘the pipeline’ at Treblinka and into the gas chamber” is assertable only after a wrenching trip to the camps, which, for Marthe, is emotion-laden proof enough that the camps would have been worse. Again, is was not Marthe’s responsibility to see that Sonja died a less than more horrific death, but to see that Sonja survived. In that, Marthe failed utterly. Some preliminary poking around may have revealed that Molitier was involved with a man thought to be a collaborator. One of her friends volunteered that information ex post facto; perhaps Marthe could have learned the same thing in time to find another hiding place for Sonja. Weil mourns Sonja — all the Sonyas — and she mourns the casualty of the truth that occurs when a desire for self-pardon finds it by using a false dilemma to obscure the central matter of the cause-and-effect relationship between actions and consequences.     "The Most Beautiful Spot In the World" Weil, “The Most Beautiful Spot in the World,” in Aftershocks: Stories. 59-61.         So evocative and unsentimentally elegiacal is “The Most Beautiful Spot In the World” that it feels, on reflection after multiple readings, as much like a yellowed photograph of a personal long-ago as it does a story. “The sea is gray and calm. Low clouds stretch to the horizon.” So in love was Bella with the Mediterranean that she had said, when she and her husband, Ben, were young and visiting Monte Sant’ Angelo, “I’d like to die right here of happiness.” Some time after the war, Ben does die “right here,” but not of happiness. At sunrise, after driving to the Mediterranean coast near Santa Margherita, Ben takes a gun from the glove box and accomplishes his second death, his first being when his beloved Bella was murdered at Sobibor while he was in England flying bombing sorties over Germany. He left her and their daughter, Ineke, behind in Holland thinking them safe. After the war, Ben worked as a test pilot and had a significant other in Rosa, whose husband perished in Auschwitz while she, like Weil, hid in Amsterdam. Like she does in The Bride Price and My Sister Antigone, Weil, in this story, tells her own story through another. It is David and Michal in The Bride Price, Antigone in My Sister Antigone, and, here, it is Ben and Bella. Weil keeps trying different lenses of multiple characters to think through her own experience again and again because it is a way she has found to gain access to that with which she must live but which eludes comprehension. But for what? What does she want, relief? Closure? Not at all. She wants to consolidate the wound’s pain by struggling to clothe it in language; psychical pain that is unconsolidated and global may overwhelm a person, as it does Ben. Unable to reconcile an alien world, i.e., one without Bella, one in which she was murdered, with consensus reality, he chose, eventually, to escape the misery by ending his life. As a writer and survivor, Weil set herself the task of limning the pain that results from psychical exile caused by Holocaust trauma. She succeeds to the extent she is able to gain some access to the pain via language. As the pain has no language of its own, the language of the story’s or novel’s structures can create semantic sensibilities that burrow through to the pain’s location, as it were, providing a way for the traumatized, or those interested in the experience of Holocaust trauma, to think about that trauma in ways it is not possible to do so any other way. Ben’s wound is like Weil’s: he survived. “Why did he run away and leave Bella and the child behind?” he wonders, incredulous, while sitting in the driver’s seat. That there was not room in the plane to England does not satisfy. But, then, it was Bella who urged him to “[d]o it [fly against Germany] for me.” The occupation could not have been foreseen, and it made sense for Ben to put his flying skills to work for the Allied cause. Both of them made the right choices, yet they still walked into a chopper blade. Like Antigone, who made a reasonable, if not the only acceptable, choice to opt for Polyneices over Creon, Weil made a reasonable, if not the only acceptable, choice to hide. Ben’s and Weil’s choices — defensible all of them — came with high prices. Ben died the same day as Bella and Ineke. He merely kept breathing and going through the motions out of habit until he made his first death official with his postwar gun-to-the-head exit.       Like Weil, Ben bore the wound that would not, could not, heal. Ben mourns because Weil mourned first, as it were. Ben and Bella offer another story through which Weil takes out her mourning, turns it over in her hands, as it were, and looks at it again. Weil mourns Waiki, so of course she understands and represents Ben’s frame of mind. She, too, experimented with the idea of suicide, both before going into hiding Weil, Antigone, 83-84. and as an elderly woman. Ibid., 77-78. She turned away from the cyanide capsule when she was young and did not want to join the Jewish Council in Amsterdam as a way to survive, and, later, when she was plagued by grief and the losses of old age, she put the sleeping pills back in the bottle. Weil mourns Ben’s death-in-life that flowed from Bella’s loss through industrial murder and his having made a choice that left her alone and vulnerable back in Holland. He grieved that he did not insist on Bella and Ineka coming to England with him, that he did not insist on there being room in the plane or take the next or the next or the next plane out of Amsterdam. The wound is what he could have done and did not do, as well as what he could have chosen not to do. The narrative of Weil’s wound is comparable: that she stayed back while Waiki went out in search of food. That she did not do, in her opinion, enough to get him released in time. Bella and Ineke went first to Mauthausen, just like Waiki, but then on to Sobibor. When Ben goes to Sobibor, he “finds nothing but gray earth, mixed with ashes.”  Ben's story, like Weil’s, is familiar structurally and emotionally. It has been repeated as many times as there were victims who left behind surviving family or friends. Weil did not write this story, though, to deliver the news that Ben and people like him suffered monumental, irreparable losses. Weil wrote the story to convey what happened in a particular way to a particular person under particular circumstances. It is something that literature is uniquely capable of carrying out. This is an elegy, not a spot-news piece. It is a recollection of the specificity of the last associations Ben has of Bella, the Mediterranean and its colors, the Italian coast as they “went wandering along the coastal road toward Sorrento and Amalfi, always high above the sea . . .” The language here is that of Weil in My Sister Antigone when she relates the journey she and Waiki made to Italy before the Catastrophe. There is no money for travel, but they take a train to Italy from Holland, nonetheless, “two days and two nights by train to Positano.” The story’s narrator speaks: “We walk along a ridge high above the sea . . .” “We head west in the direction of Sorrento and east in the direction of Amalfi, along steep slopes covered with broom.” Ben feels the sting when he reflexively pairs these idyllic images with what would come. To have beheld such beauty, to have inhabited that beauty with the beloved and then remember what is lost, the result can be the death of a personal world that is not survivable. Weil broaches the language of death-in-happiness. “Waiki and I, hand in hand, and I am so happy I wish I could die on the spot.” Just as Weil and Waiki “walk along a ridge high above the sea,” — recalled in the first person — the narrator in “World” has it: “How Bella loved the Mediterranean.” And, then, that deft, lethal line, “'I’d like to die right here,’ she said, ‘of happiness.’"  It is the abutment of, “Now Bella is dead . . .” with, “ over the Mediterranean,” "happiness” with “forget the whole world,” that is startling and attention-demanding, not in the way that attention is grabbed by spectacle, but by the incoherent gravitas of, “Bella is dead,” directly on the heels of her speaking, “happiness.” The “now" is a devastating pivot. Eden was; now Bella is murdered, and the damage is irreparable.” For a reader, the shattering occurs at that point in the text when Ben’s deeply valuable and irreparably lost constellation of connotations and associations intersects the reality of the present moment; it is rather like a drop of oil falling onto an overheated skillet: “Ben is sitting in his car alone.” It is the “Ben is . . .” that is crucial here; this is not the sentence that locates him. The next sentence does that. There is a quick cut: Ben is “on the side of the road leading from Santa Margherita to Portofino.” These are towns on this side of Bella’s death, in the time after Bella, the time on this side of the equation where “Ben is sitting in his car alone.” The names of these towns resonate, though, with towns having similarly romantic names – Positano, Sorrento, Amalfi – that are on the other side of death, before Bella’s murder, towns that Ben and Bella visited together. Ben’s world is sundered between these two sets of Italian towns that are so closely associated in Ben’s mind with beauty and carefree distance from the world where armies kill each other. That "world” is one that Weil all but explicitly names: “He looks down at what was once the most beautiful spot in the world and no longer is.” I want to suggest that the evocative arrangement of images and associations such as Weil achieves in this story demonstrates the power of what literature that is written out of the Catastrophe can convey: the poignance and devastation of enormous phenomenological significance that cannot be accessed through other kinds of writing about That Which Happened. Instances of the transcendent, such as Weil manages in these brief passages, are evidence of the creative, moral imagination at work, something that should be marked and held dear by serious people who care about representing the rupture in history with integrity.  “Finish What You Started" Weil, “Finish What You Started,” in Aftershocks: Stories. 65-108. Most short stories have simple plot structures — the  “what happens” of a story. Most can be articulated in a sentence or two. “Finish What You Started” is about a female German tourist, the protagonist/narrator (hereafter called N), a Holocaust survivor, whose path visiting the Yucatan crosses that of a man she suspects guarded Jews waiting for deportation from Amsterdam. She is initially tipped off because of a comparison he makes that only someone familiar with Auschwitz (hereafter called W) would be likely to voice, meaning that, if indeed he was in Amsterdam, he may have been a guard at Auschwitz first. That is it; that is all that happens. The genius of the story is its exploration of the protagonist’s interior response to the encounter with the man in the ruins of an ancient jungle culture shot through with rituals and practices related to death and violence. The context is dark and casts its death pall over the encounter, the memories it launches, and the imagined dialogue between the protagonist and the former guard that the protagonist uses to deal with this datum: a brute of a former camp guard who is still alive and giving tours of Indian ruins on a another continent. The past will not recede, not even in Chichen Itza. If “The Most Beautiful Spot In the Word” is an elegy, “Finish What You Started” is a meditation on the cross-cultural, transcontinental ubiquity of death and its corollaries of violence. This is not death that is merely the end of life that results from systems that have become hopelessly entropic. This is death inflicted by hatred, superstition, unchecked power, and religions that require sacrifices. This is death that draws energy from death, death that needs death to accrue power to dominate. The story up to the point that N first notices that the tour guide seems familiar is about creating a sense of the ominous and dark. It is about bringing dimensionality to a claustrophobic (the jungle), geographically isolated (the Yucatan) space where long-dead peoples sought divine succor. Imagery calls to mind the semiotics of Nazi atrocity, e.g., execution walls and piles of corpses, stone on which is inscribed imagery of hearts ripped from chests. From the first page, Weil’s lexical choices summon an atmospherics of revulsion and amorphous evil. “Jungle,” “swarms,” “dark,” “ominous,” “hot,” “humid,” “nauseated” – they all occur in the first dense page and a half. Death and decay — the equatorial gothic — are overwhelming. First are the vultures, swarms of them. “And those awful, naked bodies.  . . . Revolting, absolutely revolting,” says a woman on the bus taking tourists to the Toltec ruins. “They just remind me of death.” Like the aunt and uncle in “The House in the Desert,” the distressed woman, N explains, “doesn’t want to know anything about death that’s lying on the road.” Contributing to this primal, atavistic sensibility, a place where vultures tear at a run-over dog while the creature is still alive, is poverty. “. . . poor villages, always the same straw-covered huts, . . . [t]he inhabitants barefoot” and having “[c]losed Mongolian faces.” The environs serve as both a character and a setting for they infuse every scene with the exotic, ubiquitous, and dangerous Other, the wild that the West prides itself on having tamed. In “roadside ditches” are “iguanas, their prehistoric heads peering curiously from the grass, then pulling back shyly when anything approached, . . .” Seen through the eyes of the easily put-off woman who shrinks back into her sanitized guidebook after seeing what she regards as hideous, this is a space that does not beg to be liked, that does not seek to sell itself or beckon with its ease and safety the GAPed and the Amazoned. Its alterity, from the tourists’ cultures of origin’s perspective, is what N seeks: “The fulfillment of old longings, childhood dreams to be somewhere where it’s different, in a really foreign country, . . .” Read by N, this land is a cornucopia of the sensual: “Vultures and iguanas, red bushes with clusters of long, blue flowers, trees smothered by still-closed orchids, aerial roots, yellow, red, blue, and orange butterflies, the fragrance of blossoms, and shimmering heat in February.” It is not until she enters the ruins, the space where a long-dead people left their marks and betrayed to moderns their values, rituals, and theologies, that horror sets in, a horror that does not, in the protagonist’s mind, conceal its resonances with mid-20th-century barbarity. It is important to pause and clarify that I choose the word “resonance” because Weil does not analogize Toltec and Nazi cultures. Rather, Weil fabulates scenarios that recall certain outrages in the same way that, if left undampened, untouched strings of a piano vibrate in harmony with a string whose pitch is sounded by a soft bounce of the felt hammer. Weil handles the Toltec resonance by describing a ritual sacrifice and using the description as a point of departure for N to generalize about the sordid history of power. “And I was alone again, with the snakes, the eagles, and the hearts, hearts cut and ripped out of breasts. Why was that done to them? Always the same, from the earliest beginnings, only the method changes. People never learn. And, of course, they always have an excuse for it, power always find an excuse for every cruelty.” If there is an iconic artifact of the ruins that plays a central role in the story, it is the black wall, the Schwarze Wand, were W to render it in German, N imagines. It becomes a clue supporting N’s contention that the tour guide was an Auschwitz guard. The guide explains that Tzompantli in “Indian” means “wall of skulls.” The Toltecs used it to store the skulls of the people they killed as religious sacrifices. N describes it: “From the flattened corners, four rows of death’s heads, one above the other, extended out to both sides. On the edges, full face; on the long, flat surfaces, full or quarter profile. Only the cornerstones still had their original white color, to the sides the top and bottom rows were blackened, while the two middle rows varied from pink to orange.” There is nothing in the tour material about this wall being called black, but the guide inexplicably calls it, "The Black Wall of the Toltecs.” “What does the brochure say? The brochure says nothing. Not a word about the Black Wall.” For N, it strains credulity that the guide would, by coincidence, choose to call this death edifice the same name as the Auschwitz execution wall, the Black Wall of Auschwitz. As this is N’s perception, it is impertinent to ask whether the phrase warrants incredulity. Death pervades this story — it is about mass murder, modern and ancient; human sacrifice, justification for being in the service of death, the memory of death and of the trauma that attended living in a society the government of which wanted a lot of people dead; theorizing about the justification of killing and coping with killing, and the death or extinction of the past under the weight of murder as public policy. It is difficult for a story to be this full of death and hold together without becoming outrageous and losing credibility. It comes as a reprieve, then, when there is a moment, not just of freedom, but one of “the greatest freedom of all.” N has recalled the chance W gave her — “probably just laziness” — to escape the death sentence. There was an escape route, a passage that connected rooms in the building where N was held along with other Jews. W stayed inside, did not step into the corridor, and N peeled off and through the hallway. No guards were posted at the exit, and W did not pursue her. She was both free and a fugitive, a dead young woman were she caught. But, for the moment she was free, walking “outside in the clear morning.” She tore the star off her coat and strode in the direction of a prospective hiding place; if it worked, she had a chance to live when such a vast number were going to their deaths. It is that moment of freedom that Weil pauses on. It is not an unadulterated freedom, which makes it especially sweet. She is guilty of being free; she stands outside the law, and, despite being fragile and vulnerable and endangered, every breath and step she takes, every move, every thought, is an act in extremity, even though N could not have understood that. The woman, the survivor, understands fully; she ruminates on those brief moments of successful resistance and on the bittersweet recognition that she was not conscious enough at the time to recognize that she was living as free as she would ever live. “Not knowing that this is the hour of the greatest freedom of all. Not doing what the law commands.” Weil compares this moment with the same radically free moment that Antigone knew. She went out where her slain brother’s body lay and scooped soil onto him, symbolically burying him. Like N during those moments, Antigone was outside the law, acting radically, operating entirely on her own resources, working without a net; the game was zero sum. “Antigone buries Polynieces. The assertion of love against hate.” Ironically, it is W who made those few radical moments of freedom possible for N. Because of his choice, whether because of laziness or scruples – it is impossible to know – N walked out. As a mature woman N realizes she did nothing brave, but took advantage of one man’s momentary pause in the blind application of power. “I’m denying hate its sacrifice, not stretching out my neck.  . . . When you think about it, W helped me to it and I ought to be grateful to him for that." The second half of the story is dominated by a disorienting, disturbing romp through the ethical  burlesque of W’s defense offered by the narrator. She never confronts W except in her head, and that is what Weil captures here. These closing pages throw up specious and not-so-specious arguments that N imagines W may make were she to confront and accuse him. Weil constructs these arguments with the breakneck pacing. The bizarre follows on the heels of the credible that is edged with sharp sarcasm. A reader knows that Weil has crafted a tour de force of sophistry, moral relativism, non-sequiturs, and various species of fallacy, but most terrifying is her demonstration of a polemic that uses truth as the primary form of falsehood. It will be recognized in what follows that women’s eyes become less beautiful with time, that SS men could save Jews from certain death during selections, that people change the way they think over the course of years, that loyalty and duty are good things, concrete things and facts that are prima facie true are easier matters to come to grips with than issues that are ambiguous, such as the past — what happened and what it means. The effect is vertiginous. So crucial and extraordinary is this passage that it demands a measured analysis. N’s imagined accusatory provocations at first elicit from W familiar, if pointedly made, arguments. They continue and increase in intensity, one atticism piling atop another and another, The whole encounter barrels forward faster and with greater ferocity and clenched-fist-waving fury. It is the fierce momentum of the criminal’s outraged moral indignation. Weil has N’s thoughts running at triple speed, her mind over-saturated with humidity as well as with distress about W.       “‘Yes, dear lady,’” he’d say, ‘I was with the SS. But note carefully, it was the Waffen-SS. Wounded in the east, hit in the leg, you’ll recall that I limped a little back in those days.’” He begins by admitting his identity and that when wounded was shipped off to Amsterdam to heal while guarding Jews awaiting deportation, which is where N would have seen him. “‘But what was I supposed to do?’” It is the familiar I was following orders, I would have died had I refused defense. He does not hesitate to admit discipline was needed to keep order among “[a] real passel of pigs” – Jews who were “little shopkeepers, diamond cutters, tailors, and Talmud scholars.” Pressed on why he turned up in Mexico, W says that “[t]hings were just too confining for me back there.” In other words, he needed lebensraum, an inelegant disingenuity given his obvious incentive to flee that he might escape prosecution.   There comes a startling moment when W charges N with complicity in the Nazis’ rise. Just as N accuses him, W wants to pull her into his sinking boat. It was in Paris, 1931. N had the chance to support her “friend” in his intention to become politically engaged against the Nazis by joining the Reichbanner, a Prussian paramilitary organization that had close associations with the Social Democratic Party. It emerged as one of many such paramilitaries that formed in the turbulence of the Weimar Republic. Whether a paramilitary group belonged in a parliamentary democracy, and whether a paramilitary should be used to resist paramilitaries were questions fiercely debated. Regardless, the Reichbanner’s purpose was to push back against extremists – mostly monarchist and fascist paramilitaries. It follows, then, that N’s friend may have struck a small blow against fascism by supporting the friend’s inclination to sign up. But she did not support him; quite the opposite. N’s W taunts her: “[I]t wasn’t necessary to use all the power of persuasion at your command to get him to give up his half-baked plan. That was the moment of your guilt. W charges that N is playing a game: “[F]inish what you started,” he sarcastically urges. But it is not a game, and W knows it. N should have known the consequences of “every loving Woman” telling their husbands or boyfriends to give up their desire to oppose the Nazis. She did not ask and answer the question of “what if everyone were to choose as I choose?” N chose based on her personal preference that Waiki not get down in the muck with the brownshirts. “Guilt against guilt. Who’s going to weigh that? One justice against a different one, . . .” It is a ludicrous argument lacking all proportionality, i.e., the fact of being an SS officer versus a young woman with misgivings about her husband campaigning against a party that could not win in the first place. The point is rhetorical; it does not matter whether the offenses are comparable, only that W can make an accusation, that he can even suggest N’s complicity. I am at pains to keep in mind that it is Weil who is crafting W’s accusations against N based on what she, N, alone can know – e.g., that she discouraged Waiki from joining the Reichsbanner – that raises the question of whether Weil has N playing an intellectual game with herself to see what kinds of arguments W might deploy were she to confront and accuse him. The “Black Wall of the Toltecs” that was on the tour given by W obsessed N from the beginning, as does her suspicion that W took the phrase “Black Wall” from Auschwitz, where she insists he must have served. “‘That wall is black,” he says, but then he offers irrelevant information about the wall having been the work of the Toltecs, not the Mayas as is often cited in reference sources. It is appropriate for a good guide to set tourists straight on a historical fact that is often mis-taught. So obvious is the evasion that it may be expected that everything to follow will be so easily dismissed.       Again, N: “I don’t believe you. You were at Auschwitz."     “And if I’d been there, dear lady, it would have been the same bad luck that I had in Amsterdam,” he says, opening up the possibility that, if he was anywhere, he could have been at Auschwitz, although he claims he was not. Even were someone to identify him as having definitely been there, he says, “that would be a long way from meaning that I’d tortured people there.” And, so what if I had been there and helped herd people to their deaths, what choice did I have, he taunts. People do unpleasant things all the time that result in people’s deaths, but those people are understood to be simply doing their jobs, their duty, not being murderers. “A pilot pushes a button that drops the bomb, a worker in a poison gas factory puts a deadly chemical into a retort. An SS man at a camp makes a selection.” So, what? he suggests. “For sabotage and strikes the penalty is the firing squad.” Which is true and beside the point. W’s premise is not that SS men helping in the extermination process were not immoral, but that there was no choice. In fact, there was a choice; this is the most salient idea in Weil’s My Sister Antigone, i.e., that no is the last available freedom. Making that choice defines people at the most decisive moments of their lives: will they agree to advance evil, incur the consequences of noncompliance, or perhaps become part of the resistance. W undertakes a peroration on how thoroughly German children were schooled in following directions or orders, in being a disciplined member of an established order. Heroism was execution of duty, even it meant the execution of people. Children – everyone – was awash, W says, in news about Jews betraying Germany, of World Jewry as the enemy, that Versailles was a Jewish plot to humiliate Germany. Rather than striking W as a twisted notion of duty, he insists that, “[y]our loyalty is your honor. For the sake of loyalty, do your duty. Would have done it even there [i.e., at Auschwitz], if that place had been my fate.” Once again, he deposits his insistence that he was not, after all, at Auschwitz, which is confounding because he is making the argument that he would make had he been at Auschwitz and wanted to defend his actions. But, if he has nothing to rationalize, as he contends, it is odd that he nevertheless volunteers how he would have thought about and acted on the Auschwitz SS ethos had his service placed him there. The semantic muck gets a bit deeper as W trots out the not-unfamiliar argument that people who act one way at a certain time are not necessarily the same people who, years later, are called upon to account for themselves. “Are you still the same one to whom a young soldier said, after a long night, that you had the most beautiful eyes? Look in the mirror, dear lady. By which I don’t mean to say that your eyes have become ugly, but they’re not beautiful – certainly not the most beautiful — any more.” Here is the implicit assertion that there is no continuity of the self if the physical self and/or the shape of a person’s thinking or values change over time. It is self-evident that a woman of 25 does not look the same as when she is 65. So great is that change, in many cases, that it is easy to rhetorically ask whether the woman is the same person she was when younger? It is the wrong question because it is imprecise. The pertinent question is whether the ethical, responsibility-incurring self is, unlike youth, preserved over time. Without attempting a proof here, I will assert that the ethical choice-making self is preserved over time. Perhaps the sharpest attack that N can formulate for W to make in response is that she has let the wound heal a bit, that she has grown tired of memories and found ways to, not normalize the past, but go around it. “Yes, indeed, dear lady, you’ve adapted the way anyone who survives adapts. You’ve adapted.” "Pain becomes skepticism, indignation changes to uneasiness, and when I see you this way, on a trip that costs an arm and a leg, well-dressed, interested in people and art, I’ll bet that you’ve not only adapted, but for the most part are pretty much satisfied with this world . . .” It is a matter of the former victim having survived to become, finally, comfortable and not consumed by simply surviving. Adaptation allowed survival, and survival led to ease, if not to flourishing. Implicit is the nasty insinuation, So, what’s the big deal, what are you complaining for? And then Weil has N craft W a rhetorical switchback followed by a lunge: “And here you are trying to convince me that I’m the same person who guarded the captured Jews until their journey into death and, beyond that, you’re trying to stick me with the role of a murderer at that place. Whatever happened there, it wasn’t me." With N’s help, W exonerates himself. This is what N fears, the reason she ultimately never confronts W: she is terrified that he will be all over her with arguments and counter-arguments and indignation, which is perhaps why she is being so unstinting in her pursuit of this strongest case that W may have proffered. Preparing now for the final plunge into a manufactured gyre of moral ambiguity, W accuses N of disingenuity. After being astonished in November 1932 to see Hitler near her in a theatre, she immediately flees the place with the intention of packing and leaving for America. “However, that’s not what you did, dear lady. You did, indeed, leave the theater right then and there, but as soon as you were out on the street, you whispered to your friend that now you were completely relieved, the German people were not going to be taken in by that mediocre clown with the face of a sleazy con man.” Perhaps, W suggests, N would not have minded had Weimar Republic conditions not ended. And what if the boy N danced with at her first ball had, in fact, been W? A boy had said to her, “‘You’re an attractive Jewish girl and I march with the SA.’” “‘How do you know it wasn’t me that you kissed and allowed to fondle your breasts?’” Only N could make these arguments because only she could know what she did at the ball that night. She cannot but be ruthlessly honest with herself; if she has any interest in peace of mind, N has a strong incentive to imagine all the ways she might have been compromised by her choices. It is a method that risks scalding.   W wants to suggest there is not that much difference between him and N. It is a standard rhetorical ploy – undermine the other’s high ground by claiming that they actually share a moral position with the accused. It throws the accuser into a defensive position. It is intriguing what is going on here: Weil is crafting a deeply distressed protagonist who insists on interrogating herself by playing the part of a Nazi, by imagining her way into the rhetoric and logic of an SS man. N/Weil is actually trying to destabilize her ethical equilibrium, even to the point of accusing herself of holding a double standard, e.g., of assuming that she can change but that he cannot, of finding it acceptable to dance with a Nazi at her first ball, “[y]ou my Jewess, I your Nazi,” but condemn him, “someone who was just a good soldier, someone who took orders.” N has W make them German comrades: “We, the Germans – and in this instance, dear lady, I’d like to count us both among them . . .”  Then N has her Nazi appeal to her humanity, to understand the bane of loneliness and make room for the things people do to avoid it: “Gotta march, doesn’t matter with whom. In lockstep against loneliness.  . . . Being someone is important. What doesn’t matter,” the imaginary W argues.      Several times, Weil has W exhort N to "finish what you started,” which I take to be a challenge to make choices and follow them through even though N's W insists that choice-making must necessarily take place in a nihilistic context where up is down and down is up and black is white and the next day it is all reversed. Nothing is superior or inferior; choices do not matter because no choice is better or worse than any other choice. But it does matter to make a choice, says this conjured W. “Being someone is important. What doesn't matter.” These imperatives are contradictory: if nothing is better or worse, the imperative for choice loses its energy. But not for this W whom N is allowing to spar with her inside her head. It allows him to accuse N (who is cerebrating his existence), and it lets him off the hook. He chose, but it does not matter, according to his reasoning, that he chose the SS. N's W then takes it one step further: not only do the choices not matter, but the temporal space in which choices were taken, also called the past, or memory, does not exist because, he argues, "[o]ur past is not one that can be lived with and since we're living, it can't have existed.” It is a classical syllogism, perfect in form but fallacious because the premises are preposterous. N builds this argument for her W only to have W knock it down: "So the thing happened . . ." At one moment the past does not exist, but the next moment he admits without provocation that "the thing happened . . ." There follows a peroration as articulate as it is nefarious and fallacious. Here is Weil making the nihilist case via W: What is your truth? Fleeting images, changeable as clouds — camels, weasels, whales, while you’re tormenting yourself deciding which they are, they’ve already turned into something else. Everything flowing. Your sadness and your joy, your I-hate-the-world and your I-love-the-world, tired of life, hungry for life, the widow’s black veil over your face, sniffing the smell of blossoms, earth, semen, ski wax, full to the point of nausea and still can’t get enough to eat, yes, yes, and no, no to revenge, to forgiveness, and then you lose your nerve because of a couple of skulls chiseled into stone. Ibid., 98. In other words, N’s truth, her W contends, is a constantly shifting amalgam of perceptions and feelings and things to which nouns can be attached — all without much shape. But, then, into that muddle comes “a couple of skulls chiseled into stone,” and there is moral outrage and accusation. W is ready to admit atrocity: “Okay, it was horrible, what Las Casas described and what the witnesses said about Boger.” But W’s nihilism, the sense that those things do not matter in a world that everyone already knows is savage, responds to this admission:  "Those things are done, but not believed.” “So the thing happened that neither of us can understand today, that no one understands. It came, turned into the present, and when it was no longer able to be that, it was no longer anything.” The nihilism is rampant. Again, Weil has W using truth as the basis for the false. The first part of the last sentence could have been written by an ethicist  -- up to, “when it was no longer able to be that.” At that point, this make-believe W slips effortlessly into his nihilism, which forgives everything in its nothingness: “We dare not [think about our past], will not, cannot.” The past vanishes because it cannot be thought." Weil’s stories make that less likely.    Conclusion I have maintained throughout this work that Grete Weil’s two autobiographical novels and her short stories are productively thought of as acts of mourning. They evoke irreparable loss and hold it in a literary equivalent of magnetic fields that capture a flash of light, allow for its close examination and measurement, then release it into a sea of electromagnetism. Weil invites her reader to engage with her in a collaborative process of mourning, not just the loss, but the incomprehensibility of the loss over time – the notion that the things that have been broken shall remain that way forever and ever. The mourner viscerally understands that the past and its brokenness are present in the contemporary now, and that the wounds of that brokenness cannot be allowed to heal lest forgetting set in. Weil mourns for the ruined Europe and its ruined people who are ever with us despite office buildings having replaced the Warsaw ghetto and in spite of the Holocaust memorial in the heart of Berlin. The wound remains. That Jews can take hope in their people’s survival no matter how great their tribulations — that is not Weil’s concern. She is too overwhelmed by the Disaster, by the lost, by the struggle for meaning, by the Great Rupture in history that not only threatened every Jew, but that sullied the great tradition of German art and learning. Perhaps now it is clearer why I began this essay by suggesting that Weil’s world is that mourned on Tisha b’Av. Weil also mourns herself, the person who lived before the war, and the old woman who survived but whose life will end unheroically, so unlike her heroine, Antigone. She will forever be the widow. Waiki will forever be dead, his absence continuously present. Her dog is dead. So are virtually all of her generation of Jewish Europeans. Let others find the legitimately good news, Weil seems to say, while still others will make lives pointing out that the mourning of Tisha b’Av must be balanced by Purim and Passover, that there is a natural dialectic in Jewish history: the threat of destruction is counter-weighted, it is said, by the Jewish people’s will to survive and cope. Perhaps, but Weil has her doubts: so dark is the dark that light cannot escape. There is no, but. No, then, on the other hand . . . It is vulgar and simple-minded and willfully perky to find a bright spot in the Holocaust’s shadow. The Jewish people of Europe survived in that shadow, a wisp of their former communities. But that fact, for Weil, is eclipsed by the reality that most European Jews did not.  It would not be wrong to conclude that Weil is preoccupied with the shadows. But, it would not be entirely fair. More precise is that she cannot not see the shadows in the present, and she cannot help but articulate them in her work. 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