Kafka on Holocaust Denial, Before the Holocaust

Frequently people fall in the street and lie there dead. Whereupon all the shop people open their doors laden with wares, then the chatter begins: "Good morning,--it's a dull day--I'm selling any amount of kerchiefs--ah yes, the war." I rush into the house . . . I finally knock on the janitor's window: "Good morning," I say, "I understand a dead man was carried in here just now. Would you be kind of enough to let me see him?" . . . "Out with you!" he shouts. "This riffraff is getting in the habit of snooping about here every day. There's no dead man here. Maybe next door." I raise my hat and go.
- Franz Kafka, "Description of a Struggle"

Kafka was a Gnostic and a Jew. Integral to both is the command to remember. Only anamnesis can save us from the constant, contextless present of modernity. There is a certain nobility to being a man among the ruins; there is no nobility to being a man among the ruins who forgets how the ruins came to be. The ironic thing about neo-Nazis is that everything they oppose - the global ascendancy of the United States (and the former Soviet Union), the quashing of racial difference as a legitimate topic for debate, the decline of European strength and independence (not to mention empire!) - is the direct legacy of Hitler. We men of the present walk, sing and drink atop the graves of yesterday. The least we can do is remind ourselves that they exist.

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