3 The interviewer was Sarah Walker (BBC Radio 3, Essential Classics, 12 January 2016).
16 A Walk from Goethe’s Gartenhaus to the Gates of Buchenwald: 10,166 Steps
1 Who we met in Book One, Chapter thirteen.
2 ‘Now all has changed to chaos: I am alone in the centre of a grey and turbid nothing, and now, I know what this dream means, and I also know that I have always known it: I am once more in the Lager, and nothing was true outside the Lager. The rest was a brief pause, or a deception of the senses, a dream: family, nature in bloom, home.’
3 Sebald describes Améry’s experience in Breendonk at the beginning of Austerlitz.
4 Rosenfeld’s family were Jewish, originally from Berlin, but emigrated to America after the Nazis came to power in the 1930s.
5 ‘Oh Death, old captain, it’s time! let’s weigh anchor …’
6 ‘Our hearts, which you know are filled with light! …’
7 Literally, ‘To Each His Own’; figuratively, ‘Everyone Gets What They Deserve’.
8 Quotation from Primo Levi by Ian Thomson, Chapter Sixteen, ‘Journeys Into Germany 1954-61’.
17 The Lawyers of Washington
1 Having subsequently been removed from Internet search engines, these original documents are currently viewable at: www.therenditionproject.org.uk/documents/torture-docs.html
2 From The Participants: The Men of the Wannsee Conference by Hans-Christian Jasch and Christoph Kreutzmüller (eds.).
3 Steven Bradbury, ‘Memorandum for John A. Rizzo’, 10 May 2005, p. 10.
4 From Bybee’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, 26 May 2010, page 146.
18 Past Continuous
1 I’m not certain this figure is reliable – it comes, if that’s the right word to use, from Paul Auster – but I’ve never been sure whether it’s based on something scientific, or something more personal: ‘each ejaculation contains several billion sperm cells – or roughly the same number as there are people in the world’ (from The Invention of Solitude).
19 The Wood Pigeons and the Train
1 See Book One, Chapter Ten, ‘The Invisible Corporation’.
I always think it is interesting to consider how these companies present themselves in recent advertisements when compared to their historical record.
2 An interesting choice of address for Allianz – in a street named after a Bavarian politician known for his antisemitic speeches in the 1920s.
3 In 2002 Dresdner Bank became a subsidiary of Allianz, and in May 2009 it was legally merged with Commerzbank, and ceased to trade as a separate entity.
4 See Book One, Chapter Three.
5 Yad Vashem was built on Mount Herzl in west Jerusalem between 1954 and 1957, when it was opened to the public for the first time.
6 This is often misquoted as ‘No poetry after Auschwitz’ – what Adorno actually wrote, in 1949, was ‘nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch’ (‘to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric’).
7 Nevertheless I have attempted a (very subjective) summary of key Holocaust works in this period – see the chapter notes.
20 The Architect in Prison – a Different Man?
1 The actual phrase in German which Speer used was ‘anderer Mensch’, which carries a deeper meaning than ‘different man’. Dorothée Casalis explained that Georges felt Speer’s question implied a kind of rebirth.
2 We will return to this defining moment in Book Four, ‘The Architect in London: Last Trip’.
3 Given Speer’s love of mathematics and precision, I’m a little shocked, checking his calculations, to discover an error in these figures – 870 of his steps do not equal 270 metres but only 269.7 metres. Over a year this miscalculation gives a 109.5-metre differential, and over the twelve years of Speer’s remaining imprisonment, it gives a 1.314 km differential.
4 Wolters presumably means Mount Belukha here – the highest peak in the Altai.
5 ‘Holzwege’ was the pseudonym used by Speer in his clandestine correspondence, taken from the title of a book by Heidegger; the word has a double meaning – ‘wood roads’ or ‘wrong ways’.
21 Searching for Antigone in Ashford, and for Languages That Do Not Yet Exist …
1 This phrase does not carry a negative meaning for Weil – quite the opposite. In the same essay she explains: ‘The only way into truth is through one’s own annihilation.’ She felt that this was the necessary prerequisite for passing to a stage of attention which can then really listen to truth and affliction – ‘the name of this intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous attention is love’.
2 Explored in Book Three.
3 See chapter notes for further thoughts.
Appreciation and Gratitude
1 Although Edward Said certainly would not agree with this premise – ‘Texts are not finished objects’ as he wrote in Culture and Imperialism.