It is astonishing how little has been written about the 15th
of July 1927*, and how few eyewitness reports have recorded it for future
generations, for there were thousands of us who directly experienced it and
have preserved it in our memory like a frequently recurring nightmare. People
shrink from the difficultly of describing events that became intimate,
confusing experiences and took a course that was as simple as a scenario by an
untalented, unimaginative author who seeks his effects only in an incessant
repetition of the same dramatic incidents. This event which was at once absurd
and monotonous, led everyone to surmise that it might have a hidden meaning and
carelessly ignored causes. It was a a symbol-laden
injustice, as inflammatory as the judicial murder of Sacco and Vanzetti
that had been prepared for years and was actually carried out but thirty-eight
days after the fifteenth of July. It has not been forgotten that the fate of
these Italian-American anarchists had stirred millions of people throughout the
world to action –not for political reasons, though the organizers of the
countless marches in the big cities had a political agendas, but out of uncontrollable
anger at an injustice that convulsed everyone as if he were, or could be a
victim of it.
I am surely not the only person whom this experience has
never ceased to affect. In vital situations it has shaped my conduct almost as
strongly as the happenings at the Zablotow cemetery in the winter of 1915. Of
both events I have retained something that only appears to be harmless: a negative
astonishment at events and at those who were involved in them as actors,
victims, and witnesses – including myself. This astonishment is unending. And it
diminishes my ability to cope with the natural things and situations without
which everyday life would be inconceivable.
In all essential points I agreed with Marxism, which I
studied seriously; I embraced historical materialism and the necessity to create
a classless society in our lifetime – that is, without delay. Yes all this
seemed demonstrable to me and yet not self-evident. The negative astonishment
that had awakened my doubts about God’s power and justice and finally his very
existence later fed my doubts about the rationality of human beings as shapers
of their own history, their collective and individual fate. The rationality of
the irrational, the methodical nature of madness, the conclusiveness of a chain
of errors that remains unassailable as long as the initial error is allowed to
stand as an unimpeachable truth –all this I encountered in my psychological work
every day, disappointed but also ironically amused as I critically examined my
own actions.
When I was asked to review Emil Ludwig’s once widely read
biography of Wilhelm II, I began an in-depth study of the history of the world
war, its premises, indirect and direct causes, and finally its course.
Countless memoirs had already appeared in which statesmen, generals,
politicians, diplomats, and agents of every kind “told all”. There, too, I
never ceased to be astonished, for those sensible presentations left the young
reader who spent whole nights reading them with only one certainty: never
before had such murderous madness been prepared so logically and so
calculatingly to the misfortune of all mankind and kept going so methodically
day in and day out for four-and-a-half years. Reasonable errors reveal
themselves like barking dogs, and a forgery betrays itself by being so much
more genuine than the original, which is allowed to be flawed.
*http://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2012/03/15-july-1927-by-christopher-turner-et.html
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