NOT SENT

Finally I should accept the fact that my own thinking is also burdened with PTDS, with the postraumatic distress syndrome, to the extent that I feel compelled to meditate and to ruminate about the Holocaust and to try to answer the question of how it came about, what conditions and circumstances made it possible. Time again a quotation from Novalis pushes itself go the forefront of my thinking: "Wo keine Götter sind, walten Gespenster, und die eigentliche Entstehungszeit der europäischen Gespenster, die auch ihre Gestalt ziemlich vollständig erklärt, ist die Periode des Übergangs der griechischen Götterlehre in das Christentum." I tell myself then that National Socialism was the ultimate consequence of the abandonment of formal religion in the wake of the counter-reformation, the 30 Years' War and the Enlightenment, of Voltaire's écrasez l'infâme crush the loathsome thing — referring to the Roman Catholic Church, the replacement of religious theories concerning the creation of man with mechanical biological schemes, such as those which nominally inspired the Nazi genocides. But my thinking cannot stop there. I cannot ignore or deny the allegedly divine directives for genocide in the Bible, of the first-born Egyptian infant sons, of the Amalekites. I cannot ignore the cruel persecutions of Jews, Moslems, Christians, witches under the auspices of any formal religion.