“One should not speak of rope in the hangman’s house lest one find oneself under suspicion of holding a ressentiment.”
“Im Hause des Henkers soll man nicht vom Strick reden; sonst gerät man in den Verdacht, man habe Ressentiment.“ Theodor Adorno 1
Looks like my friend Nancy pulled a Thales of Miletos: so focused on the stars she fell into a well. I’m not laughing, mind you; just wondering why it took so long. Not even that it took my friend so long; only that they took so long to get to her.
Last time I saw Nancy we were sitting at the far end of a long restaurant table in Vienna, the four of us: Nancy, her partner who’s another academic star, my partner (same), and me, all yucking it up like a bunch of New York Jews. Earlier, in his speech, Nancy’s partner had made the mistake of acknowledging my partner, whom the Austrians had snubbed for years. Now the sponsors of the conference sat at the center table, staring at the empty place of honor. The one unpardonable arrogance of the Jews, according to the Aryan Code, is, they don’t know their place.
Knowing your place. It’s what Étienne Balibar calls “differentialist racism.” Because it wouldn’t occur, ever, to an Austrian or a German (most; okay, many) that Jews are an inferior race; only a different culture, a different nation, simple observation, mind you, said with a tight little smile. Not even that, because the issue never need come up ‘til members of that culture expose themselves to integration, absorption, or merely an invitation, as with Nancy, to teach or lecture. That’s when the question of their classification in relation to the domineering culture is inescapable.2 That’s the full meaning of the Authorities’ insistence, after Nancy was fired from her teaching gig in Cologne, that she wasn’t really fired, only that the Germans “chose not to honor her” by having her lecture, as though being raised to the same level as any Aryan academic were an honor to begin with.3 This all reminds me of the Nazi professor in Life is Beautiful who honors the Jewish hero by offering to exterminate him last.
In New York, you can be any kind of Jew you want to be: gay Jew, secular Jew, Orthodox, you name it. Even the Black Hats respect that. In Europe and in Israel you can only be the Jew that they expect of you, and they have their ways. A Jew, as Sartre points out, is never a given; a Jew, to an anti-Semite, is something that’s done to them, something they feel they have to deal with, something sooner or later they’re going to resent as a personal affront.4
Take my friend Inge, who’s busy (as most of my friends are there), being a Friend to the Jews. Inge’s one of those Austrians who thinks about the Jews all the time. To paraphrase Friedrich Engels: who thinks, because she’s thinking about the Jews, that she’s thinking the right thoughts about the Jews. So Inge was telling me about the wonderful tailor across the street, except his shop was closed for the High Holidays, with a sign on the door saying, “closed for personal reasons.” And Inge was offended, personally offended: was this Jew trying to hide his Jewishness? And why would he want to do that? To her?
Dunno. Another day, in Vienna, in the window of the small art gallery down the street, I saw a rough clay statue of two Nazis shoveling bodies into ovens, laughing. What should I do? Or rather, what was I supposed to do? This was going to be an interesting test—for me.
I contacted the authorities at the Antidiskriminierungsstelle Wien. After a month they referred me to a private organization that handled complaints of discrimination. Another month passed by and this organization responded that nothing could be done. This is when I lost it, meaning I responded the wrong way, meaning I walked into the trap of showing my true perverted Jewish self, in spite of all the tolerance I’d been shown: “Every time I walk past this gallery,” I wrote, “I feel like a woman who’s been raped, and who must interact daily with her rapist as though nothing had happened.” In other terms: like a Jew in Germany or Austria. Immediately I heard back—from Helmut, or Klaus, whatever: How dare I denigrate the Muslim girl who works for him? Likewise I’m sure, if Fatima were to file a complaint of Islamophobia, that Klaus would take it as a personal affront on behalf of Moishe Mandelbaum, who works for him—oh, right, it’s 2024. Don’t ever think negotiations, in Germany or Austria, are about reaching a mutually satisfactory agreement. Negotiations are merely a process to reinforce the Aryan’s sense of superiority, the process of putting the Jew or Arab in their proper place, one above the other or the other under one, and always both under the tolerant eye of Helmut. Or Klaus. The administration of difference takes the place of the valuation of difference. Max Weber would have been proud.
Any Jew who deals with Germans is going to be a self-hating Jew, because he’s going to hate himself in the morning.
Once I lived around the corner from Schmalzhofgasse, where a synagogue had stood, it was destroyed on Kristallnacht. Now it’s a retirement home. One day the local Party official held a small commemorative ceremony in the rec room. Two young men in yarmlkes turned up, and sang the Kol Nidrei.
The ladies were moved. One raised her hand, and asked, “What do the words mean?” The two young men exchanged a glance.
Sylvano Arieti, the psychoanalyst, wrote an account, fictionalized in part, by which he tried to come to terms with the life and death of his mentor, the Parnas, or representative, of the Jews of Pisa, the man charged with negotiating with the Goyim on behalf of the Community. Arieti was challenged to explain the undefined neurosis that crippled the Parnas, a kind, scholarly man who was terrified of walking down the street. As an aside, Arieti adds:
There were some [Jews] who... considered themselves to be Italians of the Jewish religion without any allegiance to the international Jewish organizations that were sponsoring a return of Jews to the land of Israel.
In Turin such Jews, Jewish by religion only, published a periodical called Our Flag (La Nostra Bandiera). The majority of Italian Jews, who favored Zionism, nicknamed this paper Our Fear (La Nostra Paura), in the belief that only fear of irritating the nationalist government was inducing this kind of Jew to be a public anti-Zionist.
And would it make a difference if the positions were reversed? If in 1938 the Jews of Europe were afraid of being seen as Zionists, might they be afraid of being seen as anti-Zionists today? Back on Schmalzhofgasse the two men in yarmlkes exchanged a glance.
Arieti never fully spells out the fears that crippled the Parnas; but at the end, the Parnas has been blinded by Nazis attempting to humiliate him before they kill him:
"You are blind.”
"‘I see, as never before,’ said Pardo, in an astonishingly loud voice, as if he had regained all his strength and more.
You are what I feared throughout my life, and what I can finally face.”5
Looking back on the Interwar years, Adorno says the Third Reich was present even then in every daily interaction between Aryans and Jews:
“The outbreak of the Third Reich surprised my political judgement, but not, however, my unconscious vigilant anxiety.”
„Der Ausbruch des Dritten Reiches überraschte mein politisches Urteil zwar, doch nicht meine unbewußte Angstbereitschaft.“6
Later I found out the Kol Nidrei was rarely chanted in the synagogues of Austria and Germany because the Germans and the Austrians, we feared, would twist the part that says, “may all our promising be forgiven,” to: “may all the promises made to the Goyim be considered null and void.” On Schmalzhofgasse, the two young men exchanged a glance. “Oh, the words don’t mean anything.”
Now I saw, as never before.
WOID XXIV-01
April 27, 2024
Theodor W. Adorno, „Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit,“ in Eingriffe. Neun kritische Modelle (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), p. 125.
Étienne Balibar et Emmanuel Wallerstein, Race Nation Classe. Les Identités ambigües (Paris : La Découverte, 1990), pp. 37-40; see also Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris: Gallimard 1954), p. 30-31.
“Nancy Fraser: Germany Canceled Me for Supporting Palestine,” Interview with Hanno Hauenstein; Jacobin, April 9, 2024; https://jacobin.com/2024/04/nancy-fraser-germany-palestine-letter; accessed April 20, 2024.
Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive, pp. 19-20.
Silvano Arieti, The Parnas (New York Basic Books, 1979), pp. 18, 139-140.
Theodor Adorno: Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 2005), p. 219.