In his book, ‘At the Mind’s Limits’, Auschwitz survivor, Jean Améry writes:
“We emerged from the camp stripped, robbed, emptied out, disoriented – and it was a long time before we were able even to learn the ordinary language of freedom. Still today, incidentally we speak it with discomfort and without real trust in its validity.”
Given the work I have been exploring recently, which is all centred around text, I found this particularly interesting, particularly given the text I’m exploring is that of post-memory which in terms of its validity (in respect of actual events) is by definition untrustworthy – post-memory doesn’t pretend to be accurate. Amery goes on to write:
“If I may quote once more, and once again an Austrian, then I would like to cite the words that Karl Kraus pronounced in the first years of the Third Reich: ‘The word fell into a sleep, when that world awoke.’ Certainly, he said that as a defender of this metaphysical ‘word,’ while we former camp inmates borrow the formulation from him and repeat it sceptically as an argument against this ‘word’. The word always dies where the claim of some reality is total. It died for us a long time ago. And we were not even left with the feeling that we must regret its departure.”
I didn’t know anything about Karl Kraus and so looked him up on Wikipedia. The following is taken from that source:
“Karl Kraus was convinced that every little error, albeit of an importance that was seemingly limited in time and space, shows the great evils of the world and era. Thus, he could see in a missing comma a symptom of that state of the world that would allow a world war. One of the main points of his writings was to show the great evils inherent in such seemingly small errors… Language was to him the most important tell-tale for the wrongs of the world. He viewed his contemporaries’ careless treatment of language as a sign for their careless treatment of the world as a whole…
…He accused people – and most of all journalists and authors – of using language as a means to command rather than serving it as an end. To Kraus, language was not a means to distribute ready-made opinions, but rather the medium of thought itself. As such, it needed critical reflection. Therefore, dejournalising his readers was an important concern of Kraus in “a time that is thoroughly journalised, that is informed by the spirit but is deaf to the unity of form and contents”. He wanted to educate his readers to an “understanding of the cause of the German language, to that height at which the written word is understood as a necessary incarnation of the thought, and not simply a shell demanded by society around an opinion.”