No Place Imaginable

Imagine. Imagine the unimaginable. Negatively, not positively. And then realize, not just with your mind, but with your whole body and soul, that you did not imagine it. It really happened. Auschwitz. If utopia, ού (“not”) and τόπος (“place”), is a “no place,” a place that does not exist except as a vision of a better world, Auschwitz was a “no place” where a world ended, a place where existence was negated. More exactly: existences. Not exclusively, but overwhelmingly Jewish existences. One life after another. Again and again. We could name names, and add them all together only to arrive at a number that is unimaginable not because it is so great, but rather because it is still a number, and because suffering is not a quantity. To put a number on this suffering would be an illusion, the illusion that the suffering was limited. Even unimaginably great numbers are limitations. No matter how great the number, the suffering was greater. Numbers are placebos that in the end have no effect, even if you believe in them.

Auschwitz is the paradox of an unimaginable reality. It is an unspeakable place. Because language ends where the imagination ends, the rest is silence—deathly still. For the survivors it is the silence of soul-searching and word-searching. If we don’t find the words, we have lost our soul. The silence that Auschwitz bespeaks is that of a horror vacui: the words have fled, retreating before a reality that they can neither imitate nor intimate. Before Auschwitz, Karl Kraus anticipated the words not to come, that the words would not come. In 1933 in his “Third Walpurgisnacht” he wrote: “Zu Hitler fällt mir nichts ein” (When I think of Hitler nothing comes to mind). Twelve years later the “nichts,” the “nothing” that came to mind had the name Auschwitz. Intellectual historians may debate about the extent to which the German mind created Auschwitz; any debate about whether Auschwitz has shaped the German mind is as morally irresponsible as historically false.