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drkshadow03's review
3.0
The beginning is a little disorienting with its imagery of the siege of Vienna and trying to stop Turkish invaders from conquering Christendom. Possibly being imagined by a warden of a park in Germany recently killed by three Turkish immigrants. It suggests the past, even the imagined idealized past, haunts the present.
The next part of the stories involves back-and-forth dialogue between two dead men buried in the forest under a grave marking a spot where eleven Jews were buried that had been killed by the Nazis. They discuss what they remember about their lives and the meaning of their deaths as well as guide an unborn fetus whose mother was executed and teach it about the world that they remember, but it never experienced. The discussion between the two dead characters with the occasional input from the fetus has an atmosphere that reminds me of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot with its balance of tragic and comical tone driven heavily by the dialogue, interruptions, and debate between the two main characters.
Like in Beckett’s play, it’s not really clear what they are waiting for. Provocatively the other dead don’t speak. Do they choose to remain silent or moved on to a higher plain? This question remains unanswered in the story, although it does tell us the fetus’s mother had conversed with them for a little while, until she all of a sudden stopped.
There is a sense that these dead men are clinging onto their life even if though they are dead, while forgetting the details. Perhaps this is a suggestion that what we thought mattered so much in life doesn’t in death. Nevertheless, the story is not so neat on even that point, raising as part of the philosophical debate over the meaning of their death that the two characters hold an interesting inversion: does life gets its meaning from our death or does our death gain meaning based on how we lived our life? The story also raises the issue of what will remain of us after we die. A few friends and family that remember us fondly once in awhile, a few photographs or documents, which over time will become lost and unimportant to subsequent generations.
They tell the fetus that they want to show them their Germany and wish they could see Germany beyond their forest area. This contains a great twisted and tragic irony in that the Germany they remember so fondly and long to describe also was the Germany that rejected them as true-blooded Germans on fake racial grounds and executed them for being perceived as not true Germans. Yet despite all this they still seem to love the country and parts of the lives they lost. One of the dead men, Wurm, who is an architect even claims he would have happily collaborated with the Germans if it allowed him to engage in his passion as an architect.
In one comic line, the protagonist makes a reference to the famous line from the Jewish Talmud and the title of Primo Levi’s Holocaust book, “If not now, when.” Of course, one of the more obvious meanings of the line is the duty we have to perform our responsibilities and works (whether they be on ourselves or the world) because eventually we will die. The protagonist comically employs this same reasoning to justify expressing his impulse of annoyance. After all, why wait for a different time as he is already dead. He can now do all the vices he spent so much time suppressing in life, which is a funny inversion of the idea.
The next part of the stories involves back-and-forth dialogue between two dead men buried in the forest under a grave marking a spot where eleven Jews were buried that had been killed by the Nazis. They discuss what they remember about their lives and the meaning of their deaths as well as guide an unborn fetus whose mother was executed and teach it about the world that they remember, but it never experienced. The discussion between the two dead characters with the occasional input from the fetus has an atmosphere that reminds me of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot with its balance of tragic and comical tone driven heavily by the dialogue, interruptions, and debate between the two main characters.
Like in Beckett’s play, it’s not really clear what they are waiting for. Provocatively the other dead don’t speak. Do they choose to remain silent or moved on to a higher plain? This question remains unanswered in the story, although it does tell us the fetus’s mother had conversed with them for a little while, until she all of a sudden stopped.
There is a sense that these dead men are clinging onto their life even if though they are dead, while forgetting the details. Perhaps this is a suggestion that what we thought mattered so much in life doesn’t in death. Nevertheless, the story is not so neat on even that point, raising as part of the philosophical debate over the meaning of their death that the two characters hold an interesting inversion: does life gets its meaning from our death or does our death gain meaning based on how we lived our life? The story also raises the issue of what will remain of us after we die. A few friends and family that remember us fondly once in awhile, a few photographs or documents, which over time will become lost and unimportant to subsequent generations.
They tell the fetus that they want to show them their Germany and wish they could see Germany beyond their forest area. This contains a great twisted and tragic irony in that the Germany they remember so fondly and long to describe also was the Germany that rejected them as true-blooded Germans on fake racial grounds and executed them for being perceived as not true Germans. Yet despite all this they still seem to love the country and parts of the lives they lost. One of the dead men, Wurm, who is an architect even claims he would have happily collaborated with the Germans if it allowed him to engage in his passion as an architect.
In one comic line, the protagonist makes a reference to the famous line from the Jewish Talmud and the title of Primo Levi’s Holocaust book, “If not now, when.” Of course, one of the more obvious meanings of the line is the duty we have to perform our responsibilities and works (whether they be on ourselves or the world) because eventually we will die. The protagonist comically employs this same reasoning to justify expressing his impulse of annoyance. After all, why wait for a different time as he is already dead. He can now do all the vices he spent so much time suppressing in life, which is a funny inversion of the idea.
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