Volume 10, Number 6 · March 28, 1968
Stoicism and the Holocaust
By Paul Goodman
Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima
by Robert Jay Lifton
Random House, 594 pp., $10.00
In his book on Moses, Martin Buber holds that the Bible story cannot be taken literally yet is not unhistorical: something happened that was, to those people, supernatural or crazy, and the account we have received was their attempt to cope with the experience, to regain their wits, to reconstitute themselves in the world that had been transformed. Reading these interviews from Hiroshima collected by Robert Jay Lifton of Yale, I have no doubt that those people too experienced something crazy and supernatural on August 6, when they were unprepared, thinking of other things, and their senses and passions had to confront existentially what their categories of understanding were not adequate to—this is Kant's definition of the sublime.
Review, 3974 words
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