Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

The New Republic Daily Report 11/27/10 When Books Really Mattered Leon Wieseltier *|FACEBOOK:LIKE:http://www.tnr.com/article/magazine/79087/jewish-cultural-reconstruction    |* Over a perfectly prepared bowl of cholent, the coarse stew to which all Galicianer souls are superstitiously attached, I sat in the kosher restaurant in Munich last week, on the gleaming modernist island of the city’s new Jewish institutions, and read the correspondence between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt, which has just been published in Germany. The radio played American oldies of the 1960s, in a pernicious attempt to make me feel at home. The situation was emotionally impossible, of course. It did not help that Thilo Sarrazin’s vile book, in which he deploys against Muslims in Germany the same argument that, from the eighteenth century onward, was deployed against Jews in Germany—they live apart, they have laws of their own, they do not integrate well—was flying out of the local bookstores. Some Germans are again mistaking alterity for a security threat. A day earlier I made my pilgrimage to the Glyptothek, which houses the single most erotic piece of stone I have ever seen, the ancient Greek statue of a languid satyr known as the Barberini Faun, and discovered again that flesh may envy the condition of marble; and when somehow I tore my eyes away from the imperishably beautiful man and stepped out into the Königsplatz, I found myself in the former epicenter of Nazism, on the plaza where in 1933 the books were burned, with the old headquarters of the Nazi Party still overlooking the square. Not for the first time I had the disagreeable experience of evil humiliating beauty. So I fled to the cholent and lost myself in Scholem, an old habit. Continue reading "When Books..."