Rose offers the Holocaust piety to examine the dangers of private, individual mourning. She does this by drawing on Goethe’s story, Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship and ‘the beautiful soul’. ‘The beautiful soul’ is ‘a learned but sickly female,’ who ‘retires from the world to cultivate her deepening religious piety, but … fails to find any means of public expression, or any bridge back into ethical and political life,’ and thus, she ‘pines away in consumption and dies’ (Rose, 1993: 178). Concentrating on the image of the beautiful soul, Rose explains how this becomes Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘dialectics at a standstill’ (Rose: 1993). For the beautiful soul ‘bears no fruit – her body disintegrates, her soul swells – and she returns in death
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Democracy, too, faces the same predicament, for while it remains shrouded by the Protestant ethic, it will be rendered resourceless to oppose Fascism, and thus ‘usurps the spirit of Fascism’ (Rose, 1993: 206). Drawing on Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Rose argues that protestant salvation, while denouncing Fascism at its core ‘shares one of the most destructive features of Fascism’ that is, of Protestant Innerlichkeit or (inwardness) (Rose, 1993: 206). This inwardness forms ‘a hypertrophy of inner life’ and subversively an ‘atrophy of political participation’ (Rose, 1993: 180). ‘[P]olitical melancholy’, characterised by this overt inwardness is ‘not the work of remembrance’ (Rose, 1993: 206). As it it remains redemptive in mourning, it ‘leaves everything as it is; to restore the old regime; or inaugurate a greater violence’ (Rose, 1993: 206). Yet the ‘the politics of Zakhor, remembrance’ truly are equivocal ‘inaugurated mourning bears the fruits of forgiveness: it may become silent’ (Rose, 1993: …show more content…
Anna Akhmatova’s poetry offers a channel to weave deeply personal reflection, reconciling it within the public realm. Akhmatova was one of the great pre-revolutionary poets in Russia. Russian culture is one which highly values artistic fervour and intellect. Yet in 1923, Akhmatova was expelled from the writers’ union and banned from publishing. Examining the story of Akhmatova in Requiem, as recounted by the social and political theorist Isaiah Berlin, I will uncover how the revolutionary spirit continued despite the repression of her work through remembrance. In the ‘Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism’, Isaiah Berlin recounted his trip to St Petersburg, and his meeting with Akhmatova in 1945 from memory. The ‘specific events, episodes, experiences came between me and the physical reality’ (Berlin, 2004). Despite the repression of deeds, words and memory, Soviet literature remained a central outlet from the monotonous political processes of the time. It was ‘the only genuine battlefield of ideas; [which] even now … make livelier reading than the monotonously conformist daily, and purely political press’ (Berlin, 2004: 2). Upon meeting Akhmatova, Berlin accounts of a woman who is ‘immensely dignified, with unhurried gestures, a Noble head, beautiful, with somewhat severe features and an expression of immense sadness’ (Berlin, 2004: 71).
Democracy, too, faces the same predicament, for while it remains shrouded by the Protestant ethic, it will be rendered resourceless to oppose Fascism, and thus ‘usurps the spirit of Fascism’ (Rose, 1993: 206). Drawing on Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Rose argues that protestant salvation, while denouncing Fascism at its core ‘shares one of the most destructive features of Fascism’ that is, of Protestant Innerlichkeit or (inwardness) (Rose, 1993: 206). This inwardness forms ‘a hypertrophy of inner life’ and subversively an ‘atrophy of political participation’ (Rose, 1993: 180). ‘[P]olitical melancholy’, characterised by this overt inwardness is ‘not the work of remembrance’ (Rose, 1993: 206). As it it remains redemptive in mourning, it ‘leaves everything as it is; to restore the old regime; or inaugurate a greater violence’ (Rose, 1993: 206). Yet the ‘the politics of Zakhor, remembrance’ truly are equivocal ‘inaugurated mourning bears the fruits of forgiveness: it may become silent’ (Rose, 1993: …show more content…
Anna Akhmatova’s poetry offers a channel to weave deeply personal reflection, reconciling it within the public realm. Akhmatova was one of the great pre-revolutionary poets in Russia. Russian culture is one which highly values artistic fervour and intellect. Yet in 1923, Akhmatova was expelled from the writers’ union and banned from publishing. Examining the story of Akhmatova in Requiem, as recounted by the social and political theorist Isaiah Berlin, I will uncover how the revolutionary spirit continued despite the repression of her work through remembrance. In the ‘Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism’, Isaiah Berlin recounted his trip to St Petersburg, and his meeting with Akhmatova in 1945 from memory. The ‘specific events, episodes, experiences came between me and the physical reality’ (Berlin, 2004). Despite the repression of deeds, words and memory, Soviet literature remained a central outlet from the monotonous political processes of the time. It was ‘the only genuine battlefield of ideas; [which] even now … make livelier reading than the monotonously conformist daily, and purely political press’ (Berlin, 2004: 2). Upon meeting Akhmatova, Berlin accounts of a woman who is ‘immensely dignified, with unhurried gestures, a Noble head, beautiful, with somewhat severe features and an expression of immense sadness’ (Berlin, 2004: 71).