Salman Rushdie has written an eloquent memoir, a meditation on his near murder by an assassin’s knife, called, simply, Knife. On seeing this book, I immediately recalled another book title, a German counterthrust to Adorno’s 1951-dictum, “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch” (After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric). The title of this resistant text, which appeared in 1955, is Mein Gedicht ist mein Messer: Lyriker zu ihren Gedichten (My Poem is My Knife: Lyric Poets on Their Poems).[1] Here is evidence that men and women will write poems, will continue to take dictation from their personalità poetica; but in this instance they do so at an extraordinary distance from their recent history, from the Nazi catastrophe and its aftershocks. An engaged German poetry needed another generation of writers.
What does that mean, “my poem is my knife”?
The best answer is Rushdie’s, who, unlike the German poets, experienced the metaphor literally, on his own body.
Language, too, was a knife. It could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths. It could cut through from one reality to another. It could call bullshit, open people’s eyes, create beauty. Language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back. It could be the tool I would use to remake and reclaim my world, to rebuild the frame in which my picture of the world could once more hang on my wall, to take charge of what had happened to me, to own it, make it mine.
But this meditation follows a grueling recrimination:
Why didn’t I fight? Why didn’t I run? I just stood there like a piñata and let him smash me. Am I so feeble that I couldn’t make the slightest attempt to defend myself? Was I so fatalistic that I was prepared simply to surrender to my murderer?
Why didn’t I act? Others, family and friends, have tried to answer the question for me. “You were seventy-five years old at the time. He was twenty-four. You couldn’t have fought him.” “You were probably in shock even before he reached you.” “What were you supposed to do? He could run faster than you, and you weren’t armed.” And, repeatedly, “Where the hell was the security?”
I don’t really know what to think or how to reply. On some days I’m embarrassed, even ashamed, by my failure to try to fight back. On other days I tell myself not to be stupid, what do you imagine I could have done?
This is as close to understanding my inaction as I’ve been able to get: the targets of violence experience a crisis in their understanding of the real. Children going to school, a congregation in a synagogue, shoppers in the supermarket, a man on the stage of an amphitheater are all, so to speak, inhabiting a stable picture of the world. A school is a place of education. A synagogue is a place of worship. A supermarket is a place to shop. A stage is a performance space. That’s the frame in which they see themselves.
Violence smashes that picture. Suddenly they don’t know the rules – what to say, how to behave, what choices to make. They no longer know the shape of things. Reality dissolves and is replaced by the incomprehensible. Fear, panic, paralysis take over from rational thought. “Thinking straight” becomes impossible, because in the presence of violence people no longer know what “thinking straight” might be. They – we – become destabilized, even deranged. Our minds no longer know how to work.
On that beautiful morning in that attractive setting, violence came running at me and my reality fell apart. It is perhaps not very surprising that in the few seconds available to me, I didn’t know what to do.
You find a startling confirmation of Rushdie’s reflections in Anne Carson’s fantasy “We’ve Only Just Begun,” in her book titled Wrong Norma:
They got into our car at a stoplight. It was cold. We never lock the doors in back. There were two of them. At the apartment they terrorized us. It took all day, most of the night. There was beating and thrashing and scorn and damage and fear. Sounds I didn’t know came out of us. Above all it was boring. In the sense it was all actions and all bad, there is no life of the mind available amid beating and thrashing and scorn and damage and fear, no space at the back of oneself to go to and think anything else. Long stretches of boredom fill up with something like thinking but there is nothing to think except what it is, what it is to be in this, and what it is to be in this is simply and utterly nothing but what it is, no volume around it, no beach, no reverie. At one point, Washington raised his arms to me, and blood ran down both his arms to the floor. I watched it hit the tiles, it would have been something to think about, cleaning blood off tiles. Sometimes it’s better to just replace them. Eventually in fact that’s what we would do, replace the white ones. We kept the black ones, which were sort of speckled anyway. But “eventually” is not a concept of mind that exists amid beating and thrashing and scorn and damage and fear. …[2]
Some fifty years ago, in a stunning memoir titled At the Mind’s Limits, Jean Améry established the point, made in life by him and in fiction by Carson: under torture the mind finds no place to resist, for it “contains no concept that exists amid beating and thrashing and scorn and damage and fear.” But Améry also describes an action of another kind, opposite to Rushdie’s and Carson’s inaction: at Auschwitz, after a guard had punched him in the face, Améry hit back. The result was predictably brutal … and yet:
Revolt; well, of course, that is another one of those high-sounding words. It could lead the reader to believe that I was a hero or that I falsely want to present myself as one. I certainly was no hero. When the little grey Volkswagen with the POL license plate crossed my path, first in Vienna, then in Brussels, I was so afraid that I couldn’t breathe. When the KAPO drew back his arm to strike me, I didn’t stand firm like a cliff, but ducked. And still, I tried to initiate proceedings to regain my dignity, and beyond physical survival that provided me with just the slightest chance to survive the nightmare morally also. There is not much that I can present in my favor, but let it be noted anyhow. I took it upon myself to be a Jew, even though there would have been possibilities for a compromise settlement. I joined a resistance movement whose prospects for success with very dim. Also, I finally relearned what I and my kind often had forgotten and what was more crucial than the moral power to resist; to hit back.
Before me I see the prisoner foreman Juszek, a Polish professional criminal of horrifying vigor. In Auschwitz he once hit me in the face because of a trifle; that is how he was used to dealing with all the Jews under his command. At this moment—I felt it with piercing clarity—it was up to me to go a step further in my prolonged appeals case against society. In open revolt I struck Juszek in the face in turn. My human dignity lay in this punch to his jaw—and that it was in the end I, the physically much weaker man, who succumbed and was woefully thrashed, meant nothing to me. Painfully beaten, I was satisfied with myself. But not, as one might think, for reasons of courage and honor, but only because I had grasped well that there are situations in life in which our body is our entire self and our entire fate. I was my body and nothing else: in hunger, in the blow that I suffered, in the blow that I dealt. My body, debilitated and crusted with filth, was my calamity. My body, when it tensed to strike, was my physical and metaphysical dignity. In situations like mine, physical violence is the sole means for restoring a disjointed personality. In the punch, I was myself—for myself and for my opponent. What I later read in Frantz Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre, in a theoretical analysis of the behavior of colonized peoples, I anticipated back then when I gave concrete social form to my dignity by punching a human face. To be a Jew meant the acceptance of the death sentence imposed by the world as the world verdict. To flee before it by withdrawing into one’s self would have been nothing but a disgrace, whereas acceptance was simultaneously the physical revolt against it. I became a person not by subjectively appealing to my abstract humanity but by discovering myself within the given social reality as a rebelling Jew and by realizing myself as one.[3]
On the rightness of fighting back, terming it “the restorative battle,” the scholar David Pickus reflects:
This has been a hallmark trope since Gilgamesh had it out with Enkindu and Achilles sulked in his tent. However, I think the most … [decisive] version of it … is the story of the fight with the “slave-breaker” Mr. Covey in Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. It is a moving account of how he was broken in spirit before he fought Covey and became a “man” after he hit back:
Long before daylight, I was called to go and rub, curry, and feed, the horses. I obeyed, and was glad to obey. But whilst thus engaged, whilst in the act of throwing down some blades from the loft, Mr. Covey entered the stable with a long rope; and just as I was half out of the loft, he caught hold of my legs, and was about tying me. As soon as I found what he was up to, I gave a sudden spring, and as I did so, he holding to my legs, I was brought sprawling on the stable floor. Mr. Covey seemed now to think he had me, and could do what he pleased; but at this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolve to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose. He held onto me, and I to him. My resistance was so entirely unexpected that Covey seemed taken all aback. He trembled like a leaf. This gave me assurance, and I held him uneasy, causing the blood to run where I touched him with the ends of my fingers. Mr. Covey soon called out to Hughes for help. Hughes came, and while Covey held me, attempted to tie my right hand. While he was in the act of doing so, I watched my chance, and gave him a heavy kick close under the ribs. This kick fairly sickened Hughes, so that he left me in the hands of Mr. Covey. This kick had the effect of not only weakening Hughes, but Covey also. When he saw Hughes bending over with pain, his courage quailed. He asked me if I meant to persist in my resistance. I told him I did, come what might; that he had used me like a brute for six months, and that I was determined to be used so no longer. With that, he strove to drag me to a stick that was lying just out of the stable door. He meant to knock me down. But just as he was leaning over to get the stick, I seized him with both hands by his collar, and brought him by a sudden snatch to the ground. By this time, Bill came. Covey called upon him for assistance. Bill wanted to know what he could do. Covey said, “Take hold of him, take hold of him!” Bill said his master hired him out to work, and not to help to whip me; so he left Covey and myself to fight our own battle out. We were at it for nearly two hours. Covey at length let me go, puffing and blowing at a great rate, saying that if I had not resisted, he would not have whipped me half so much. The truth was, that he had not whipped me at all. I considered him as getting entirely the worst end of the bargain; for he had drawn no blood from me, but I had from him. The whole six months afterwards, that I spent with Mr. Covey, he never laid the weight of his finger upon me and anger. He would occasionally say, he didn’t want to get hold of me again. “No,” thought I, you need not; for you will come off worse than you did before.”
This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free. The gratification afforded by the triumph was a full compensation for whatever else might follow, even death itself. He only can understand the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery. I felt as I never felt before. It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.
From this time I was never again what might be called fairly whipped, though I remained a slave four years afterwards. I had several fights, but was never whipped.[4]
Pickus continues:
It doesn’t take long when looking at the text to see that Douglass deliberately styled the story to result in a new equilibrium. There are other battles in the book which turn out differently, including that of a slave named Demby who became “unmanageable” and winds up with his brains floating on the water. Moreover, Douglass had a wider purpose. He was one of the first to argue for the existence of what has come to be called “structural” violence, meaning: he meant to show that, as the battle could not be avoided, it was mete and proper to seek it out (see his remarks, below, on John Brown at Harper’s Ferry to show the logical deductions he makes in this regard).
https://www.nps.gov/hafe/learn/historyculture/frederick-douglass-at-harpers-ferry.htm
There’s much more to be said, but two (I believe) equally logical conclusions can be drawn:1. Fighting back does indeed heal an inward sense of weakness and brokenness—much faster and more effectively than any doctrine of renunciation. But the idea that the fighting will be parceled out and conclude in “measure for measure” belongs in storybooks.
2. There are some clever fellows who use stories of restorative fighting to advocate a larger point, namely that there’s an ultimate conflict to be won and “let each one take his place.” When we happen to agree with the bigger narrative, such voices can seem quite inspiring. However, back in the day when such things were possible, I used to underscore the evidence that slavery was a totalizing system that—this was Douglass’s point—necessitated a totalizing assault in turn.[5]
I return to this text in my own voice but only to cite another. Across the ocean, at around the same time that Douglass was being beaten, scapegoating the Jew was in full force, which news will come as no surprise. In a biographical manuscript by Emanuel Kirschner, the eminent cantor and composer of synagogue music describes early days in Upper Silesia: “In contrast to the peace-loving Rockitnitz village youth, some of the boys who worked in the Theresiengrube distinguished themselves for their extraordinary brutality. We were attacked on the way home by these bandits, fortunately not often, who said: ‘Jew, give us something, or we’ll kill you like a frog.’ In the absence of money, we ransomed ourselves with a steel pen, penholder, or pencil, and were allowed to hurry home to our parents’ house, where lunch and dinner, combined in one hearty meal, awaited us.”[6]
It is not recorded what Kirschner’s parents had to say to him.
This story touches a nerve in me. I grew up in a fairly safe, compact neighborhood, together with a lot of wild kids, for the most part children of immigrants—Jewish, Italian, Irish, and Hungarian. Despite the remote horrors of the war, our days were calm except for a bit of non-lethal ethnic strife, especially between the Italian and the Jewish kids. On my way home from junior high, a tough Italian named Rudy would accost me and say, “You a Jew?” He could curse in Sicilian, fist upraised menacingly: “Ba fungu!” If I said I was a Jew, he would hit me, not overly hard, and I would either stand there, puzzled, or curse quietly and keep walking. One day, I finally struck back—first. But I was not used to fighting, and as my punch hardly deserved that name, the reward for my impulse was a bloody nose and some confusion. On my returning home and complaining of my injuries, my mother uttered these words of wisdom (Michelle Obama would be glad to know): “If you hit someone back, make sure you knock him down … or else don’t do it.” I would have had to knock Rudy unconscious to quiet him down. … The answer to violence, ingrained in the species, has always remained moot. I have only this final chastening word by David Pickus to offer: “Your mother said what Machiavelli said, and probably for the same reason: Look at things as they are, not how we want them to be.” Cast a cold eye.
…
Notes
1 Ed. by Hans Bender (Heidelberg: W. Rothe, 1955).
2 Anne Carson, Wrong Norma, kindle 158/190.
3 Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, kindle 90-91/111.
4 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, kindle 1003-1025/1709.
5 From a personal communication dated August 16, 2024.
6 A portion of this MS. had been graciously sent me by Ms. Stefanie Mockert.