Curiosity: insubordination pure 
This paper is dedicated to my old Roberto Camerani
former deportees, friend and teacher
So despite all the life-
"is the beautiful"
I ask you now to make a jump back in time and imagine yourself in a place other than this room.
E 'May 10, 1933. We are in Bebel Platz in Berlin, not far from the most important German museums. But we are also in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Heidelberg.
Right now the books are burning.
In Europe's most important university towns, students, ordinary people, including bystanders, are burning books.
books are different: the political opponents of "Communist intellectuals," for example. They are books that do not correspond to the German spirit.
E are the books by Jewish authors. The Nazi attempt to annihilate the people of the book begins, precisely, dalla distruzione dei libri. In questo momento bruciano –metaforicamente e non- Freud, Einstein, Stefan Zweig, Schnitzler, Meyrink. Nella Germania nazista bruciano almeno cento milioni di libri.
E drammaticamente, come intuì il poeta, dove si bruciano i libri si finisce- prima o poi- per bruciare anche gli uomini.
Se la cancellazione del popolo ebraico -dell’Altro, del Diverso- comincia simbolicamente in questo 10 maggio 1933 in cui gli strumenti con cui si tramanda la memoria- i libri- vengono annientati, allora recuperare le storie di quei libri, la conoscenza che essi tramandavano, è un primo passo verso il recupero della memoria. Andare in archivio, scartabellare, spulciare, spiare, significa ricostruire something which was in danger of being lost. Fabio
you first spoke of the importance of forgetting. His words are all the more shocking in this day dedicated to the memory. But they are profoundly true. Yes, because none of us could survive in the bottom of this room (even in this Bebel Platz where we are now facing the smoke of the burning of books), none of us could survive if fully remember, every minute, every place of his mind and his body, the extermination of Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses and political oppostori murdered in Nazi death camps. None of us would survive being constantly under the eyes and the entrance to Auschwitz what it represents.
Yet at the same time, this temporary forgetfulness, forgetting part that makes us live and act, can only be the result of a deeper memory. The attempt of Germany after the war to remove what happened, not to mourn but to summarily fine, in fact, led to disastrous consequences.
Oblivion volunteer becomes, in this case, very serious crime because it reduces the memory false memory. What happened there is always as you try to remove it, it always comes back. In a story by Kafka, a family is confronted with a terrible anger: a living in his house without being precise form, without identity. Odradek, so called, at times, but invariably disappears then returned to his home. Odradek is in Kafka-and-the rest of us forget that continually looks to our minds, albeit in a distorted and unrecognizable. Until we become aware of him, it will remain our sorrow, will remain something that we have not done the math. Odradek, in fact, can never die. Its existence will continue even if our end. It 's like a burlap sack with everything that belongs to us. Garbage included.
Many children of Nazis took their own lives, many others have become skinheads, few have been able to develop a Alternatively, in both cases Odradek destroyed their lives and those of others. Sometimes, moreover, the memory of the victims of the extermination camps has proved its unsustainability in suicides occurred many years after the end of the war: Jean Amery took his own life in a hotel room in Salzburg in 1978, Primo Levi put an end to his life nine years later in his apartment in Turin.
To survive, therefore, it is true, you have to indulge in short forgetfulness. But never, never can we forget about these omissions, we can never forget that to live we put aside something for a few moments, we must never forget that you forgot. And then to come to terms with the past it also means letting it touches us deep within, as we have touched the intimate discovery of the archive. Let the lives and stories of our deformed other, which encourage us in thinking, concentration, intuition. Somehow, we must be able to take Odradek hand, watch this carefully, and understand how to do our deformation. Take his "no form" and forgot to make a new Odradek, a new form, one of our own form of resistance not only to Nazi crimes, but any injustice committed against anyone anywhere in the world. Citing
one by one the names of the six million dead in the fields and always mention one by one hundred million books burned in Nazi bonfires.
More simply, mentioning the names of the boys expelled from the Royal High School Cesare Beccaria after retrieving away in the basement of Linnaeus. Use
culture, knowledge, curiosity as a primary form of resistance.
Who even knows he Odradek in your home, you will more easily victim of the distortions of history, revisionist inventions, words have no basis. Those who chat with Odradek ago, will not be as duped. As Nabokov says, really Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form. Moreover, no history book can ever tell how it feels when you cross the threshold of a gas chamber. And 'here then that must focus our ability to identify with other human beings. And 'here that should be used, in the deepest sense, our imagination and not in the falsification of evidence. Only a fool would now deny the existence of extermination camps. So this our imagination, which led us recently in Bebel Platz and that leads us forward to face the gates of Auschwitz, it may be urged the more so by those hundred million books burnt and their stories "because nothing defends' living being against the stupidity of prejudice, xenophobia, of dullness, nationalism discriminatory better dell'ininterrotta constant of great literature: the essential equality of women and men at all latitudes and injustice represented by established between their forms of discrimination, addiction, exploitation "(Vargas Llosa).
claim the power of literature and imagination means, therefore, claim a primary right of human beings, a right of which he regains Primo Levi in \u200b\u200bthe middle of the field when Dante says a fellow prisoner.
Here Pikolo careful, open your ears and mind, I need you to understand
Consider your origin
You were not made to live like brutes
but to follow virtue and knowledge
felt as if I will for the first time as a trumpet, as the voice of God for a moment, I forgot who I am and where I am.
Reading Dante at this moment means to recover its identity as a man, be a moment out of the death camp, power for a few seconds to breathe again a free man. Some books are to this: are made to breathe. For a moment allow us to change things and let us therefore imagine that they can be done differently.
The final night of Buongiorno, Bellocchio's film about the kidnapping of Moro, Moro shows us that if went home free. The last pages of a beautiful novel by Safran Foer Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close-play-on the contrary, however, images of a man who throws himself from the Twin Towers the morning of 11 September. If the slide quickly back to the man upstairs. You save as Moro.
What these works of art they want to communicate is not a false history. We know that More was killed and left in a red Renault in via Caetani. We know that the man jumped down from the tower and landed below.
What we say is that next time may save Moro, as men-should-if we understand something. And they say that Air driven in large towers, no: there must be a next time.
What we must prevent that in future there are new camps.
In this sense, I think, Fassbinder argues that art frees the head. It urges us to think, to change the future, to deform, ie to give a new shape than the past has already been dramatically.
So I think yes, after Auschwitz there can and should be making art, albeit in a different course. Art is an expression of our humanity, our desire for tulips as well as bread. The art of Dante makes the soul to Levi in \u200b\u200ban extreme situation, much more to what he could do a table spread.
So it seems to me that the monument to the victims of the Holocaust of the Monumental Cemetery in Milan is all the more significant the more skeletal remains are present in our eyes. How to say because of this atrocity could not speak, as a work of art with traditional media, use a different language, speech synthesis and absolute extreme frankness. What I recall is much stronger than what could be mimetic.
Similarly the Jewish Museum Berlin by Daniel Libeskind says, in his twisted deformation of the building and free entry, a story that only we, with our minds of viewers and our awareness of how we humans can understand and complete.
Finally I'd like to read a brief letter from a student in Tehran who writes
"My fantasy is that the applicant's Charter of Rights be added to the voice, image rights. Now I am convinced that true democracy can not exist without the freedom of imagination and the right to freely use the works of fantasy. To live a life real, complete, must be able to give form and expression to their own private worlds, their own dreams, thoughts, desires, need to get your private world can always communicate with the world of all. Otherwise, how do we know that we exist? ".
I am convinced that if we can prevent further burning of books and ideas, thoughts and cultures of other fires, in any way and anywhere they burn longer accept that human beings, that the different gates, the non-aligned .
Sherazade basically saved his life and that of other women by appealing to the imagination and the right story, right?
