124 Bettina Kaibach
Moscow exhibition of looted art about to be shipped back to the Dresden
Gallery. The expression on the Madonna’s face as she knowingly gives up
her child to his fate of torture and suffering embodies the very kindness that
miraculously prevails in the face of tyranny and oppression and preserves
our humanity. 71
It takes one single word to cut short Grossman’s eulogy on the human
spirit: Treblinka. The memory of the eyewitness accounts he collected on the
site of this annihilation camp when advancing into East Poland with the Red
Army reminds Grossman that there are moments in history when the already
tenuous balance that lies at the base of human civilization is disrupted, when
the message of the Sistine Madonna is unheeded, and the human spirit is
crushed by beast-like cruelty. While the “wolf age” (“volchʹe vremia”) 72 of
Nazism is the most radical of such disruptive moments, it was neither the
first nor will it be the last. In a bizarre parade, Grossman has both Hitler and
Stalin file past Raphael’s painting. Hitler, the failed artist, has to avert his
eyes from the Madonna and her child, because “they were human beings”
(“vedʹ oni byli liudʹmi”). 73 Stalin looks at her, “but did he recognize her?” 74
The implicit question here is a provocative one: did he recognize her in
the eyes of the starving kulaks and those who perished in the Gulag during
the Great Purges? 75 From here, Grossman has the Madonna continue her
journey through the ages to future sites of genocide (among others, in an
eerie premonition, to Sudan). But how does the present era, which Grossman
defines as the age of nuclear reaction, stand the test, when confronted with
the Sistine Madonna?
For Grossman, the nuclear age, and specifically the advent of thermonuclear weapons, possesses a disruptive potential on an altogether different
scale. While the totalitarian regimes aimed at crushing the human spirit,
the nuclear age threatens to unhinge the earth itself, the very foundation of
human (and not only human) life. With this leap from genocide to omnicide,
for the first time in human history, the possibility arises that the human spirit,
embodied by the Madonna and her child, will be destroyed for good:
Every now and again the post-war silence is disrupted by the thunder of
explosions, and a radioactive cloud spreads across the sky.
And then the earth on which we live shudders; the atom bomb has
been replaced by the hydrogen bomb.
Soon we must see the Sistine Madonna on her way. She has lived with
us; she has lived our life. Judge us then, judge us all – along with the
Madonna and her son. Soon we will leave life; our hair is already white.
But she, a young mother carrying her son in her arms, will go forward to
meet her fate. Together with a new generation of people she will see in
the sky a blinding, powerful light: the first explosion of a thermonuclear
bomb, a super-powerful bomb heralding the start of a new, global war.
What can we, people of the epoch of Fascism, say before the court of
the past and the future? Nothing can vindicate us. We will say, ‘There
Moscow exhibition of looted art about to be shipped back to the Dresden
Gallery. The expression on the Madonna’s face as she knowingly gives up
her child to his fate of torture and suffering embodies the very kindness that
miraculously prevails in the face of tyranny and oppression and preserves
our humanity. 71
It takes one single word to cut short Grossman’s eulogy on the human
spirit: Treblinka. The memory of the eyewitness accounts he collected on the
site of this annihilation camp when advancing into East Poland with the Red
Army reminds Grossman that there are moments in history when the already
tenuous balance that lies at the base of human civilization is disrupted, when
the message of the Sistine Madonna is unheeded, and the human spirit is
crushed by beast-like cruelty. While the “wolf age” (“volchʹe vremia”) 72 of
Nazism is the most radical of such disruptive moments, it was neither the
first nor will it be the last. In a bizarre parade, Grossman has both Hitler and
Stalin file past Raphael’s painting. Hitler, the failed artist, has to avert his
eyes from the Madonna and her child, because “they were human beings”
(“vedʹ oni byli liudʹmi”). 73 Stalin looks at her, “but did he recognize her?” 74
The implicit question here is a provocative one: did he recognize her in
the eyes of the starving kulaks and those who perished in the Gulag during
the Great Purges? 75 From here, Grossman has the Madonna continue her
journey through the ages to future sites of genocide (among others, in an
eerie premonition, to Sudan). But how does the present era, which Grossman
defines as the age of nuclear reaction, stand the test, when confronted with
the Sistine Madonna?
For Grossman, the nuclear age, and specifically the advent of thermonuclear weapons, possesses a disruptive potential on an altogether different
scale. While the totalitarian regimes aimed at crushing the human spirit,
the nuclear age threatens to unhinge the earth itself, the very foundation of
human (and not only human) life. With this leap from genocide to omnicide,
for the first time in human history, the possibility arises that the human spirit,
embodied by the Madonna and her child, will be destroyed for good:
Every now and again the post-war silence is disrupted by the thunder of
explosions, and a radioactive cloud spreads across the sky.
And then the earth on which we live shudders; the atom bomb has
been replaced by the hydrogen bomb.
Soon we must see the Sistine Madonna on her way. She has lived with
us; she has lived our life. Judge us then, judge us all – along with the
Madonna and her son. Soon we will leave life; our hair is already white.
But she, a young mother carrying her son in her arms, will go forward to
meet her fate. Together with a new generation of people she will see in
the sky a blinding, powerful light: the first explosion of a thermonuclear
bomb, a super-powerful bomb heralding the start of a new, global war.
What can we, people of the epoch of Fascism, say before the court of
the past and the future? Nothing can vindicate us. We will say, ‘There