"in the best of spirits" and "seven hundred thousand": W.G. Sebald

Below I post an excerpt from W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. I use the word carefully: Sebald was a genius. His pastiche of writing and blurred photography applied to the melancholy of post-WWII Europe in books such as this, The Emigrants, and Austerlitz, are not only haunting but portend a near future that we may all be either denying or ignoring out of a sense of powerlessness. The events he describes happened just under 75 years ago. If history has taught us anything, it’s that our species doesn’t learn from history. In this passage, Sebald ties the unspeakable seamlessly to the civilized “normal” of the United Nations and the space probe Voyager II. Please note that I put in bold aspects of this excerpt here that resonate with me. However, in the actual book, these bold fonts do not appear. Instead of watching the last five minutes of that streaming binge-TV on Netflix, I dare you to read this, which is fact-checked and accurate, and contemplate Trump, Bolton, Boris Johnson, Putin, et al. Read this and recall the mindless chants of “send her back” at rallies recently here in the USA. I have no idea what to do about what appears to be an crumbling of our society (I did give Warren a $100 donation and I will vote for whoever is on the Democratic ticket) but I strongly sense that, whether Trump wins or loses in 2020, a new-normal of chaos, probably with senseless violence, awaits us. The slope is slippery and, at first, the slide doesn’t seem so bad. Then the law of acceleration kicks in. May the gods help us all.

Excerpt from The Rings of Saturn written by W.G. Sebald, who died in an automobile accident at the age of 57 on December 14, 2001.

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That afternoon I sat alone until tea time in the bar restaurant of the Crown Hotel. The rattle of crockery in the kitchen had long since subsided; in the grandfather clock, with its rising and setting sun and a moon that appears at night, the cogwheels gripped, the pendulum swung from side to side, and the big hand, bit by bit, in tiny jerks, went its round. For some time I had been feeling a sense of eternal peace when, leafing through the Independent on Sunday, I ran across an article that was related to the Balkan pictures I had seen in the Reading Room that morning. The article, which was about the so-called cleansing operations carried out fifty years ago in Bosnia, by the Croats together with the Austrians and the Germans, began by describing a photograph taken as a souvenir by the men of the Croatian Ustasha, in which fellow militiamen in the best of spirits, some of them striking heroic poses, are sawing off the head of a Serb named Branco Jungic. A second snap shows the severed head between lips still parted in a last cry of pain. This happened at Jasenovac camp at the Sava. Seven hundred thousand men, woman and children were killed there alone in ways that made even the hair of the Reich’s experts stand on end, as some of them are said to have admitted when they were amongst themselves.  The preferred instruments of execution were saws and sabers, axes and hammers, and leather cuff-bands with fixed blades that were fastened on the lower arm and made especially in Solingen for the purpose of cutting throats, as well as a kind of rudimentary cross gallows on which the Serbs, Jews, and Bosnians once rounded up, were hanged in rows like crows or magpies. Not far from Jasenovac, in a radius of no more than ten miles, there were also the camps of Prijedor, Stara Gradiska and Banja Luka, where the Croatian militia, its hand strengthened by the Wehrmacht and its spirit by the Catholic Church, performed one day’s work after another in a similar manner.  The history of this massacre, which went on daily for years, is recorded in fifty thousand documents abandoned by the Germans and Croats in 1945, which are kept to this day, according to the author of the 1992 article, in the Bosanske Krajine Archive in Banja Laka which is, or used to be, housed in what was once an Austro-Hungarian barracks, serving in 1942 as the headquarters of the Heeresgruppe E intelligence division. Without a doubt those who were stationed there knew what was going on in the Ustasha camps, just as they knew the enormities perpetrated during the Kozara campaign against Tito’s partisans, for instance, in the course of which between sixty and ninety thousand were killed in so-called acts of war, that is to say were executed, or died as the result of deportation. The female population of Kozara was transported to Germany and worked to death in the slave labor system that extended over the entire territory of the Reich.  Of the children who were left behind, twenty-three thousand in number, the militia murdered half on the spot, while the rest were herded together at various assembly points to be sent on to Croatia; of these, not a few died of typhoid fever, exhaustion and fear, even before the cattle wagons reached the Croatian capital. Many of those still alive were so hungry that that they had eaten the identity tags they wore about their necks and thus in their extreme desperation had eradicated their own names. Later they were brought up as Catholics in Croatian families, and sent to confession and their first holy communion. Like everyone else they learnt the socialist ABC’s at school, chose an occupation, and became railway workers, sales-girls, tool-fitters and bookkeepers. But no one knows what shadowy. memories haunt them to this day. In this connection, one might add that one of the Heeresgruppe E Intelligence officers at that time was a young Viennese lawyer whose chief task was to draw up memoranda relating to the necessary resettlements, described as imperative for humanitarian reasons. For this commendable paperworkhe was awarded by Croatian head of state Ante Pavelic the silver medal of the crown of King Zvonomir, with oak leaves. In the post-war years this officer, who at the very start of his career was so promising and so very competent in the technicalities of administration, occupied various high offices, among them that of Secretary General of the United Nations. And reportedly it was in this last capacity that he spoke onto tape, for the benefit of any extra-terrestrials that may happen to share our universe, words of greetingthat are now, together with other memorabilia of mankind, approaching the outer limits of our solar system aboard the space probe Voyager II.