The Satanic Cosmic Force 121
never recover. 59 He falls into utter despair over the fact that he has contributed to the death of so many people and eventually tries to commit suicide.
For him, not even the argument that the murder was committed for the
sake of good (the Auschwitz-Pearl Harbor argument) is valid anymore. The
sheer scope of destruction renders the traditional categories of good and bad
worthless. “Abel, Abel, where is your brother Cain?” (“Abelʹ, Abelʹ, gde brat
tvoi Kain?”), 60 says one of the crew members jokingly when Connor talks
about his despair over the dead civilians. It is not accidental that here the
roles of Cain and Abel are reversed. What Connor’s colleague wants to imply
is that sometimes the good brother has to commit an evil act for the sake
of the general good. For Connor, this does not suffice to explain the moral
quandary of the crew. He carries the reversal of Cain and Abel to a radical
extreme: “Cain was an ordinary guy, not much worse than Abel, and the city
[i.e. Hiroshima] was full of people just like us. The difference between them
and us is that we exist, and they no longer do.” 61 For Connor, after the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima, the traditional categories of good and evil have lost
their validity. The question of intent (evil committed for the sake of good)
becomes negligible. The ancient fight between good and evil is superseded
by the question: “Is life on this earth still possible?” 62
By reversing the prototypical story of good and evil within human history,
Grossman marks the Hiroshima bombing as rupture in civilization, after
which we need to fundamentally rethink the tenets of this civilization. 63
Grossman nurtures no illusions about society’s response to this perspective.
The fictitious crew members of the Enola Gay make it clear that there are
only two places for people like Connor: a monastery or a mental institution.
In the late 1940s, the legend spread around the world that, in an act of
atonement, one of the pilots involved in the bombing of Hiroshima had
retreated to a monastery. In 1953, the year, when Abel (August 6th) was written, Major Claude Eatherly, who had performed the reconnaissance flight that
preceded the bombing of Hiroshima, was tried before a New Orleans court
for a financial misdemeanor, the profit of which he had forwarded to a fund
for the children of Hiroshima. After several attempts at suicide and a series of
crimes, Eatherly committed himself to a mental institution. In the late 1950s,
Eatherly became world famous through his correspondence with AustrianJewish philosopher and anti-nuclear activist Günther Anders, who stylized
the repentant pilot as “the world’s first martyr for Nuclear Disarmament,” in
the disapproving words of Ronald Bryden. 64
Interestingly, in Abel (August 6th), Grossman anticipates in the form of a
fictional narrative many of the thoughts that Anders was to develop in his
letters to Eatherly and his essays from the late 1950s and early 1960s. First:
Grossman’s fictional crew experiences what in Anders’ Theses on the Nuclear
Age is termed “schizotopy” – a total spatial as well as mental separation of
cause and effect that is, according to Anders, typical of modern bureaucratictechnological culture and results in a suspension of human agency: individual agency has been replaced by the pressing of a button, a mechanism of
never recover. 59 He falls into utter despair over the fact that he has contributed to the death of so many people and eventually tries to commit suicide.
For him, not even the argument that the murder was committed for the
sake of good (the Auschwitz-Pearl Harbor argument) is valid anymore. The
sheer scope of destruction renders the traditional categories of good and bad
worthless. “Abel, Abel, where is your brother Cain?” (“Abelʹ, Abelʹ, gde brat
tvoi Kain?”), 60 says one of the crew members jokingly when Connor talks
about his despair over the dead civilians. It is not accidental that here the
roles of Cain and Abel are reversed. What Connor’s colleague wants to imply
is that sometimes the good brother has to commit an evil act for the sake
of the general good. For Connor, this does not suffice to explain the moral
quandary of the crew. He carries the reversal of Cain and Abel to a radical
extreme: “Cain was an ordinary guy, not much worse than Abel, and the city
[i.e. Hiroshima] was full of people just like us. The difference between them
and us is that we exist, and they no longer do.” 61 For Connor, after the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima, the traditional categories of good and evil have lost
their validity. The question of intent (evil committed for the sake of good)
becomes negligible. The ancient fight between good and evil is superseded
by the question: “Is life on this earth still possible?” 62
By reversing the prototypical story of good and evil within human history,
Grossman marks the Hiroshima bombing as rupture in civilization, after
which we need to fundamentally rethink the tenets of this civilization. 63
Grossman nurtures no illusions about society’s response to this perspective.
The fictitious crew members of the Enola Gay make it clear that there are
only two places for people like Connor: a monastery or a mental institution.
In the late 1940s, the legend spread around the world that, in an act of
atonement, one of the pilots involved in the bombing of Hiroshima had
retreated to a monastery. In 1953, the year, when Abel (August 6th) was written, Major Claude Eatherly, who had performed the reconnaissance flight that
preceded the bombing of Hiroshima, was tried before a New Orleans court
for a financial misdemeanor, the profit of which he had forwarded to a fund
for the children of Hiroshima. After several attempts at suicide and a series of
crimes, Eatherly committed himself to a mental institution. In the late 1950s,
Eatherly became world famous through his correspondence with AustrianJewish philosopher and anti-nuclear activist Günther Anders, who stylized
the repentant pilot as “the world’s first martyr for Nuclear Disarmament,” in
the disapproving words of Ronald Bryden. 64
Interestingly, in Abel (August 6th), Grossman anticipates in the form of a
fictional narrative many of the thoughts that Anders was to develop in his
letters to Eatherly and his essays from the late 1950s and early 1960s. First:
Grossman’s fictional crew experiences what in Anders’ Theses on the Nuclear
Age is termed “schizotopy” – a total spatial as well as mental separation of
cause and effect that is, according to Anders, typical of modern bureaucratictechnological culture and results in a suspension of human agency: individual agency has been replaced by the pressing of a button, a mechanism of