Auschwitz

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 begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: They're only animals.

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals. Theodor Adorno

 cries out with the pain of immense suffering and pleads for a future of respect, peace and encounter among peoples.

Auschwitz cries out with the pain of immense suffering and pleads for a future of respect, peace and encounter among peoples.

is without an answer. To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy, and it is Israel that enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray of God's radiance in the jungles of history.

There is no answer to Auschwitz...To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray of God's radiance in the jungles of history.

is a praxis based on a new principle: for one portion of mankind, existence itself became a crime, punishable by humiliation, torture, and death. And the new world produced by this praxis included two kinds of inhabitants, those who were given the "punishment" and those who administered it.

The Auschwitz praxis was based on a new principle: for one portion of mankind, existence itself is a crime, punishable by humiliation, torture, and death. And the new world produced by this praxis included two kinds of inhabitants, those who were given the "punishment" and those who administered it.

is that without which there is no German identity

There is no German identity without Auschwitz.

is a place where the only exit was by way of the chimney.

It is this refrain that we hear repeated by everyone: you are not at home, this is not a sanatorium, the only exit is by way of the Chimney. (What did it mean? Soon we were all to learn what it meant.)

is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air: rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.

Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.

is a horrific revelation of the nature of Western civilization, and it ‘opens up, or closes, a quite other history than the one we have known up until now.

For Lacoue-Labarthe, drawing on Heidegger’ s reading of nihilism, ‘ Auschwitz’ is a horrific revelation of the nature of Western civilization, and it ‘opens up, or closes, a quite other history than the one we have known up until now’ (LacoueLabarthe 1990: 45).

auschwitz, n.All

auschwitz