Kategori: Huvudämne – Litteratur

I. B. Singer’s short story ‘The Last Demon’ appears on the surface to be exactly what it says it is: a (very) short story about a demon that is the last of his kind dealing with the quandary concerning what demons should do and why there even should be demons when ‘man himself is a demon.’ In much the same vein, Adorno once deemed it ‘barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz’—not impossible, as is often claimed, a reading later challenged or qualified. Primo Levi, in turn, said, ‘After Auschwitz, it is no longer possible to write poetry except about Auschwitz.’

“Chronicle of a Single Day” is a text from the volume Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto (written in the Warsaw Ghetto in August 1941 and here read in the English translation) whose recurring themes are hunger and confinement. The text in question is undoubtedly the most literary in this volume; it refers openly to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and nods to many other literary texts; the ramblings and wanderings of both the body and the mind of the protagonist make one think of James Joyce’s Ulysses, where the main protagonist Leopold Bloom is not starving, but is all the same, in Episode Four of the book, obsessed with items of food, with kidneys and other offal, and carries them around with him; much in the same way as this text’s protagonist figuratively speaking carries with him, and during his walks is confronted with, those who are already dead and those who are not yet dead (which seems, despite some allusions to former and present societal divides, like the mention of the ricksha-carried chair of the Judenrat, to be the only two categories of people still left); the flesh that already is or soon shall become grass (Isaiah 40:6).