The Wandering Jew of Gaul

Andre Glucksmann, wandering Jew:
"Mr. Glucksmann, was the driving power behind your thinking fury?"

"More my childhood and the lifelong sense that I was on the edge of an abyss."

Glucksmann's father came from Bukovina, his mother from Prague. They had emigrated to Palestine long before Hitler seized power; there they met and married. Glucksmann's two sisters were born there. In 1930, the young couple gave up all security to go to Germany to help the anti-fascist opposition. Exposed in 1937, they were able to escape to France at the last moment. There, Jojo Glucksmann was born, a German-speaking Jewish child. To the outside world he was "Andre Riviere", French speaking, Christian. The family lived with false papers in constantly changing accommodations near Lyon.

The father died in 1940. In 1941, French police uncovered the Glucksmann family and brought them to the Bourg-Lastic camp near Vichy, from where they were to be deported to Germany. Andre's shrewd mother rallied her fellow travellers around her and described what she thought they were in for. Fearing tumult, the guards separated out her and her children. Having been born in France, Andre had a right to French citizenship, which provided the guards with a welcome bureaucratic excuse to let the family walk.

But when the condemned boarded the train, Andre's sister Micky ran to them and called, "I am a Jew! There's been a mistake, I'm a Jew!" The mother caught her, slapped her and dragged her back. The police looked away.

The key moment in Glucksmann's biography took place on a sunny afternoon, shortly after the liberation of France. The banker family, the Rothschilds, gave a party at their Chateau Ferrieres for Jewish orphans who had been spared the Holocaust. They were celebrating the end of the war, the mood was light – until little Andre took off his shoe and flung it at the moneyed benefactor.

In retrospect, Glucksmann thinks that he simply couldn't bear that, after all he had experienced, people were pretending that everything was alright, and that this attitude could somehow delete what had happened.

"Much of what I later wrote has come from the same impulse," he says today. "Even after the fall of the wall in 1989, there were many who bought the illusion that everything was better now, that the story was over. 'Dreams are the guardians of sleep,' said Freud. We incorporate anything that might disturb our sleep into our dreams so that we don't have to wake up. There are many guardians of sleep. The thinker's task is to fight against them."

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