Chapter 4 Memories of Suffering——For the 45th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp

"What's it called when the innocent are on one side and the sinners are on the other?" "I don't know, miss." "Use your brain, fool." "I don't know, miss." "If people destroy everything, everything is lost, but the sun still rises and the air is still fresh..." This dialogue written by the French film artist Godard at the end of his new story "Famous Carmen" made me unable to relax. Miss Carmen—a beautiful, enthusiastic, self-willed girl, rich in female life intuition, drinking submachine gun bullets, lying in a pool of blood, with the last breath of life, raised two questions that I could not answer.Human history and individual survival are severely tortured by two questions.However, the dead are dead after all, and the living live in the problems of the dead, and the sun is still rising, and the air is still fresh...

In January of this year, I saw the film "Famous Carmen" for the first time, on the forty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, one of the hallmarks of the suffering of the tenth century.Miss Carmen's dying question made me think of the thousands of dead in Auschwitz. The meaning of the word "liberation" has become weak. After all, it cannot bring the dead back to life, nor can it guarantee the torture of the innocent.Among the innocents who died in Auschwitz, there are many young and beautiful boys and girls. The evil of Auschwitz is not only a disgrace to the West, but also to the Chinese; the misfortune of Auschwitz is not only the misfortune of the West, but also the misfortune of the Chinese.For it is a crime committed by man; and a crime committed by men of knowledge;As long as it is a living person, it cannot escape its shadow.The Chinese are also caught in a Kamen-style problem of absolute universality.Our toilsome relationship with Auschwitz is not a question of so-called internationalism, but an existenzial one.

After Auschwitz, Western thought passed philosophy.Theology and various forms of literature and art have been deeply reflecting on the crimes and misfortunes of Auschwitz.Carmen-style questions, although unanswerable so far, cannot be shelved.The living should be with the innocent dead, don't we have nothing to do with the reflection on the suffering after Auschwitz? 1. After Auschwitz In Western intellectual works, "After Auschwitz" has become a technical term.As far as I can see, there are no less than ten kinds of monographs on this topic.As the French philosopher P. Ricoeur said, philosophy today faces a decisive challenge from evil.

German philosopher Adorno (TWAdorno) was the first to put forward "after Auschwitz" as a philosophical topic, and he is also one of the most profound philosophers in this kind of suffering reflection.Adorno's famous quote: Nach Auschwitz gibt es keine Gedichte mehr (poetry no longer exists after Auschwitz), has not lost its mournful weight to this day. Adorno felt that Auschwitz was first of all his own subjective pain for him. Although Adorno was in exile in the United States during the Nazi era and had never tasted the pain of a concentration camp, he still felt that Auschwitz was about his own personal pain. reason to live.He asked himself this question: Is there any reason for him to live after Auschwitz?Continuing to live after Auschwitz has somehow made indifference a principle of subjectivity and justified doubting consciousness as a necessary response to barbaric experience.However, when people are forced by life to continue living, they must take a responsibility so that Auschwitz will not be repeated.

As a philosopher, Adorno introduced this responsibility into his metaphysical thinking, and regarded Auschwitz as the basic experience of his philosophy. In Negative Dialectics, the opening title of the chapter "Metaphysical Meditations" is "After Auschwitz".Adorno believes that Auschwitz is both the cipher of the bewildered and deeply wounded world process, a bitter word sounding from the abyss, and the cipher of philosophy of history and epistemology.In this cipher, the living world approaches the horrors of foreknowledge.Philosophy is supposed to recognize this horror, but it appears so impotent.Auschwitz cannot be grasped conceptually by reasoning, nor can one find philosophical comfort in it.

Not only that, in Adorno's view, Auschwitz is also a public proof of the failure of modern civilization, and a sign of the complete failure of all ideals dedicated to a perfect world. A shadow that never fades.Under this shadow, the speculative rationality of philosophy can only be in despair and pain. It has obviously failed to grasp the suffering and misfortune of human beings, and is forced to describe the suffering and misfortune in society and history objectively. Only in this way can the subjective impulse to be saved be expressed.Only the power of memory and the conditions made of sorrow and pain are the ferment of the transcendent light of hope.

Auschwitz not only forced philosophy not to understand historical materials from superficial phenomena, but to find out the hidden structure of history, but also forced philosophical thinking to possess an absolutely necessary quality: the will of the subject based on the memory of suffering.Only in this way can philosophy find its place of existence in the traces of existence that have been trampled. 2. Innocence After Auschwitz, the existence of the living and of the living is guilty.This is guilt in an existential sense, not in a psychological sense, just as Auschwitz is an existential mark of suffering and shame, not a regional or national mark of suffering and shame.This universal sign means that the crime and barbarism of the twentieth century are unique.The suffering and misfortune created on the pretext of world ideals and the future of mankind have erased the basis of human existence.Once we remember the innocent dead, the young and beautiful lives destroyed on one side, and the criminals on the other, our survival of the past is called into question.I have seen many movies with the theme of Nazi concentration camps. "Sophie's Choice" raises a question that has troubled me so far: innocence.While this work is far less poignant than Piaying for Time in its depiction of the horrific torture of concentration camps, or even on its theme, the questions it asks are quite poignant: Human innocence and its effect on belated happiness.

On the way to the concentration camp, the Nazis forced Sophie to hand over her children, a son and a daughter, to send them to a death camp.Sophie tried her best to prove her innocence, and even used her beauty to seduce Nazi officers in order to keep her children.The Nazi officer told her that one of the two children could be kept, and it was up to Sophie to choose which one to keep.Sophie was going mad, she cried, there was no way she could make such a choice.The answer of the Nazi officer was: Then both children will die.At the last moment, Sophie finally shouted: Keep the son. Sophie's choice made me feel irrepressibly disgusted with Mr. Sartre's free choice theory.Sophie's choice shows that this doctrine is at least existentially untrue.Free choice does not exist when the structure of existence is ontologically criminal due to the evil done by some people.Kafka understood this well, even in terms of the natural ontological nature of the structure of being, that free choice does not exist.Human beings have to make choices in their survival, and they are placed in the laceration of their existence. The choice must be guilt, even though it is an innocent guilt.Sophie's choice should be understood in a metaphorical form, and its meaning goes far beyond the event itself.

The young writer who loves Sophie deeply hopes to run away from home with Sophie and achieve happiness together.After all, people can only live once, and any chance of happiness will secretly delay the old age.Sophie knows this, but she recalls this painful memory and rejects happiness. The guilt reflected in Sophie's choice this time stems from the painful memory of innocent misfortune.Shockingly, it is innocent guilt!Although Sophie is the sufferer of suffering and the innocent unfortunate, she still has to take the initiative to bear the overflow of sin in the suffering.Sophie felt that she was no longer a good mother, that she had lost her right to happiness.

In the Chinese language context, the quality of life has been corrupted, and they regard themselves as the undoers of human beings, the promoters of history, and the creators of the new world. They don’t even have the guilt of guilt, let alone innocent guilt!The lack of guilt shows the loss of the most basic sense of spiritual quality, which is one of the roots of crime.Can we say that innocence as a spiritual quality has nothing to do with us? I will never forget the long close-up shot of Sophie at the end of "Sophie's Choice": the tears have already flowed out, and the dry eyes are still wide open, looking forward to seeing something.This is the hallmark of painful memories.The innocence and guilt imprinted on this face of suffering, humiliation, and tears for no reason poses a silent challenge to the quality of human nature that has been corrupted by ideology.

3. Love and Death I have seen two movies about the Subibo concentration camp.One is realistic and the other is artistic feature film.I feel more for the latter, which raises the question of love in suffering. The Subibo Concentration Camp is famous not only because it is one of the largest death camps after Auschwitz, but also because a real mass escape took place there.The movie "Escape from Subibo" is based on this escape incident. The whole movie is thrilling from beginning to end. In the death camp, alien death is not an undetermined accident, it is a definite present necessity; it is not that people will go to alien death, but alien death has already approached people.If we only look at the natural form of life, everything no longer exists.As a result, justice, goodness, and love appear even more groundless in the shadow of different deaths.Although justice, goodness, and love have been reversed by historical evils and ideologies, so many modernists doubt, deconstruct, and mock them for no reason, but in the death camps, there are still people who cannot bear to throw away justice, goodness, and love. Love. For example: In a concentration camp, more than a dozen fellow prisoners lined up in front of the rest of the fellow prisoners. They tried to escape, but unfortunately they failed.Now he is waiting to be shot on the spot, in front of all the friends in distress, to "kill one as an example to others".One of the young fellow sufferers suddenly passed out on the ground, he couldn't bear this strange death.At this time, a pastor walked out of the group of fellow sufferers and applied to replace the young man and was shot.He was allowed. In the face of love, death loses its terrifying power. There is another kind of love. The Jewish girl Lisa fell in love with a Russian lieutenant in a concentration camp, and she enthusiastically and boldly expressed her love to the Russian prisoner of war.The Russian lieutenant always avoided this girl, not because it seemed absurd to fall in love in a death camp, but because he had a wife and children in faraway Russia.The Russian lieutenant did not kiss the Jewish girl lightly until the night before the instigation to escape the riot. The next day, the Jewish girl was shot dead.She failed to cross the open space between the camp fence and the nearby woods.After all, she was a weak girl, and the machine gun bullets shot into her body from behind made her gently fall to the ground and never got up again. The Russian lieutenant survived.Like many other fellow victims who had the good fortune to escape, he became a witness at the trial of the Nazi executioners.But he was also a witness to love in the death camps. I don't know if the Russian lieutenant ever felt remorse in his heart, regretting that he had not responded to the Jewish girl's love in the concentration camp, regretting that he had not loved her well back then, feeling sorry for the girl who loved him in the shadow of a strange death. Love is a real happening, not an ethical rule.Ethical rules should be based on a religion of love.In the religion of love, the crucified love breaks all the laws of nature, it overcomes the death of nature in the death of divinity, and resurrects true love in the death of nature.In the affirmation and negation of crucified love—the affirmation of the affirmation in life and the negation of the negation in life—love sustains the rootless remains of every living being. Man is man after all, and he is neither immortal nor immortal.Love should overcome death in life, not compensatory love. 4. Walk into the innocent In the movie "Escape from Subipo", there is a shocking scene: the chimney of the crematorium in the concentration camp stands on a beautiful field, the background is the brilliant sun, and the air is so transparent and fresh... Do you find this incongruous?Do you think the smoke from the cremation of concentration camps pollutes the air?However, nature did not protest, it still used its beautiful body to provide a background for the evil in the world, and never shed a single tear for the suffering in the world. All natural existence has never been silent about the evil in the world and the innocent misfortune suffered by man. They have not and cannot accuse all injuries, and they have not and cannot comfort the misery of misfortune, so that crime and misfortune become natural things. . This is true not only of nature, but also of history.If human survival is ultimately based on nature or history, human crime and human misfortune will be natural. Only the supernatural and superhistorical divine existence constitutes the absolute negation of the evils in the world, and can comfort the unreasonable misfortunes suffered by people.Human evil and human misfortune will not be natural only when human existence has a place in the embrace of supernatural, superhistorical divinity. From modern times to modern times, human thought has been obsessed with the natural extension of human existence: manufacturing technology and its organization, expanding the coverage of language, and trying to find or establish the ultimate existence of human beings.Man is a creature of labor, a creature of language, and a creature of social existence.What was the result?In the 20th century, human beings are speechless and helpless in the face of all kinds of killing machines, technological killing machines and ideological discourse killing machines.The evils of Auschwitz took place in technology and a specific discourse system.The evils produced by technical organizations and specific discourse systems have appeared before Auschwitz, and have been renewed after Auschwitz.Auschwitz is but a general symbol of countless evils of the twentieth century. The innocent are on one side, and the criminals on the other; history has not changed this reality so far, the sunshine of nature has not disputed this, and as the victimized innocent, there can be no more than one question to ask. Even certain divine beings are silent!Not all the divine beings have charged human evil: no metaphysical divine beings; no mystic divine beings;What is even more frightening is that the sacred existence of religion also provides meaning for innocent misfortunes and unwarranted deaths—theodism.In our day and age, traditional theodism is once again charged by philosophy and theology, and with good grounds. Only in "Golgotha" the adult divine presence is silent.He not only accuses the world of evil, but walks among the innocent himself.Only this holy being who became an adult on the cross saw people destroy everything, but when the sun was still rising and the air was still fresh, he felt great pain. He couldn't bear it, so he became an adult, and voluntarily chose the innocent suffering Way to be an adult in order to meet every innocent person.The God of Christ did not provide any meaning for innocent misfortune and unwarranted death, but suffered and died with people as a divine and eternal being.Even the artist Rodin understood: God is an Other who abandons himself to the other side, and his hand ("God's Hand") stretched out to this world is just a trembling hand of love, supporting the hug of a naked man and woman.It is precisely because of this divine being who incarnated innocent misfortune and guilt that every innocent dead from ancient times to the present cannot be allowed to be forgotten. 5. Memory suffering In a theological seminar, the Marxist philosopher Markovich asked the theologians Mertz (JB Metz) and Lanner: "Has prayer ceased to exist after Auschwitz?" To play on that famous quote from Noah.Merz was overwhelmed by the question and felt its weighty implications. Auschwitz is also a challenge to Christianity. "After Auschwitz", Christianity is also facing a crisis of legitimacy: Is it appropriate to use predestination to discuss the traditional form of Christian belief?Are Christianity's traditional statements about historical significance appropriate? The Catholic theologian Merz proposed: There is never a historical significance that can ignore Auschwitz to save, there is never a historical truth that can ignore Auschwitz to maintain, and there is never a person who can ignore Auschwitz. The God of history to whom Swithin went to pray.Christian theology must be able to feel history in its negativity, that is, in its catastrophic nature.Remembering every victim from a practical-political point of view should become an intrinsic requirement of Christian theology. " Merz re-emphasizes the profound biblical category of memoria passionis (memory of suffering).He advocated that the memory of suffering should become a universal category and a category of salvation.Without this category, human subjective life will increasingly become anthropocentric, and human subjective existence will increasingly become an intelligence without memory and a machine with flexible functions.Therefore, Merz urgently asked Christian theology to state the memory of suffering, and worked hard for the memory of suffering to enter the public consciousness again and again. The memory of suffering exhibited by the Bible is unique, and in all philosophy and other Eastern religions there is no category associated with it.The memory of suffering is not only a value quality of the subject spirit, but also a kind of historical consciousness.As a historical consciousness, the memory of suffering refuses to recognize that the victories of the successful and the existing in history must be meaningful, and refuses to recognize the natural laws of history.The memory of suffering believes in the meaning of the ultimate time of history, so it dares to look into the abyss of history, dare to remember the destruction and disaster, and does not recognize that the so-called social progress can relieve the misfortune and injustice suffered by the innocent dead.The memory of suffering indicates that history is always guilty and guilty. As the value quality of the subject's spirit, the memory of suffering cannot allow the suffering in history to be placed in an objective order that has nothing to do with the subject, and refuses to admit that the so-called inevitable process of history can bestow suffering in history.In a certain objective sense, there is legitimacy in refusing to recognize the so-called antinomies of historical development.The memory of suffering requires that each individual exist to realize the subject of suffering in history, not to regard past suffering as a history that has nothing to do with one's own individual existence, and not to allow the past suffering of innocent people to be meaningless and meaningless in personal existence.The memory of suffering thus puts forward higher requirements for the quality of human nature. Merz saw that after Auschwitz, it was no longer possible for each individual to put aside the existence of innocent victims in history to seek their own freedom, Happiness and rescue. God asks us to remember every innocent dead and every evil in history. 6. An Unforgivable Apology One of Goethe's best friends, Zelter, unfortunately lost his young only son, and he was deeply saddened.Goethe wrote to comfort him with the concept of immortality (Unsterblichkeit).However, Goethe himself immediately felt that this confession was too ignorant and flimsy. Indeed, when I think of the countless victims of Auschwitz and the ghosts of innocent people who died in various man-made sufferings, I can't help but feel at a loss for words, and it's hard to write words of comfort.Even the memory of suffering can't make the living feel at ease, the real "unsettled after all"... I am still alive, but they are dead, and they are so young, younger than me... When I was young, I watched "Guest on the Iceberg", and there was a sentence that I never understood.The lieutenant rescued Gulandam, and he was shot by a black gun. Before he died, Gulandam said to the dead: "Remember me, my name is Gulandam." The living actually begged the dead to remember her. Isn't it a ridiculous request? Now I understand.It is still a luxury for the living to let the living remember the dead, and the living always owe life to the innocent dead.I can only ask the innocent dead to remember me, because they live and live forever, and I am dying.I belong to them, so I implore them to remember me. No matter in Auschwitz or Subibo, flowers are everywhere now, and there are various statues for the dead.Although China is far away from there, I still hope to go there one day and offer some Chinese flowers.Because I remember that many innocent dead have no burial place, let alone flowers, and no epitaph.I had to take flowers to Auschwitz... April 1990 Berkeley