It’s been well over two years (Dec. 29, 2004) since Susan Sontag died, but in some reading and researching today she came up again.
On the other hand, they include moving passages of reminiscence, in one case a description of Sontag’s childhood reading, and in another—for the German Book Trade award, the Friedenspreis—her relationship (as a Jew, as a writer) with German culture: “[M]y entire childhood was haunted by Germany, by the monstrousness of Germany, and by the German books and the German music I loved, which set my standard for what is exalted and intense.”
[ source ]
I don’t know if the source is a book or a lecture, but when talking about Hannah Arendt and her relationship with Martin Heidegger, there is a quote along the lines, it’s not that she slept with him, it’s that she continued to do so after she knew he was a Nazi. Sontag has little to do with this, of course. But her relationship to German culture might be similarly conflicted, as it has been for German Jews I’ve known as well as a survivor or two. And then there is a friend of a friend, who to this day paints all Germans and all things German with the same broad brush of blame and guilt and hatred.
And that’s why Sontag’s word, haunted, is so useful. It has denotation and connotation, but it’s ambivalent and ambiguous enough that you can work with it, play with it, engage it — from it can develop a dialog or discourse, between the past and present.
There is a great deal of and for Sontag still out there, as is to be noted in Regina Marler’s Why We Miss Susan Sontag, Volume 1 or even in Mike Mosher’s obituary or sorts at Bad Subjects. And then you see how hated she was by the right, though the singling out of Sontag and, later in the “essay,” of Bernard-Henri Lévy, indicates that perhaps it’s really just a matter of typical anti-semitism (note: George Soros is also blamed) on the part of the article’s author, Srdja Trifkovic, and the website/magazine, Chronicles, a liberal-hating cesspool of irrationality. And then you realize, it’s not necessarily anti-semitism — it’s a paleoconservative hatred of anything liberal, democratic, or not-Christian. Muslims are also much hated by Trifkovic, for example, but this just fits, it seems, with his extreme Serbian nationalism.
Thus it is with a certain amount of regret that I have to think about the loss of a humanist, someone who was not consumed by hatred, someone who could think critically and yet with compassion …
Yesterday, March 11, 2007, Kurt Vonnegut died. He was 84.
And I still haven’t read any of his books.
