All right, dear Consul General in Meek Paterson, ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you to today's
exciting event, a reading and discussion with the award-winning author Elizabeth Rosner
and her father Karlheinz Rosner.
The reading of the German translations will be performed by the German actress Jozanna
Poelmaier.
We feel very honored that Consul General in Meek Paterson from the Consulate General of
the United States here in Hamburg is with us tonight and agreed to address us with some
opening remarks.
So, please, the mic is yours.
Welcome, Elizabeth.
Welcome, Mr. Rosner.
Thank you, Mr. Poelmaier.
Thank you, Professor Wohr, Liberguester.
I was in Bergen-Belsen yesterday for the 67th anniversary of the liberation, although
I read much about that camp, as it was notorious for the condition that the liberating British
soldiers found there, I had not been there.
After the event was over, I took a long walk along the many mass graves, which she simply
says, a thousand, just a number, and they walk along the, in the field of beautiful
birch trees, together with mass graves.
And once again, I thought, certain images cannot go away and certain history should
not be forgotten.
So I went to Bergen-Belsen yesterday for the 67th anniversary of the liberation, as
it was notorious for the condition that the British soldiers found there, as it was notorious
for the condition that the British soldiers found there, as it was notorious for the
condition that the British soldiers found there.
I'm a mother of three children, so I can only imagine what it was like to give up your three
sons.
And after the event, I went to Bergen-Belsen yesterday for the 67th anniversary of the
liberation, as it was notorious for the condition that the British soldiers found there.
So I went to Bergen-Belsen yesterday for the 67th anniversary of the liberation, as it was
notorious for the condition that the British soldiers found there.
And after the event, I went to Bergen-Belsen yesterday for the 67th anniversary of the
liberation, as it was notorious for the condition that the British soldiers found there.
And after the event, I went to Bergen-Belsen yesterday for the 67th anniversary of the
second-generation survivors, those who suffer from the experience of their parents, who
struggle with what they have gone through.
And it is about a character named Sola, a Latin American housekeeper, who supports Julian
while Pola is in Europe.
Sola is the only survivor and witness of massacre of the people in her village.
Julian, Pola, and Sola fight to forget, to understand, to share the burden of what they
know and what they don't know.
I would like to introduce to you Professor Susan Raw from the Institute for Americanistic
and the Rooney Hamburg Bedancken.
She is also here.
She is the only one who has been in Hamburg.
She is a member of the American Center.
She is also here with us today to present to you the book.
It is a great privilege to have a chance to listen to parts of the book.
And learn more about Karlheinz Rosner's and Elizabeth Rosner's experience.
I'm looking forward to your conversation, and I guess we all are curious to learn how
you, Mr. Rosner, perceived this novel of your daughter.
Thank you very much for your kind remarks.
Before I introduce tonight's speakers, I would also like to express my gratitude to some
institutions, friends, and members of my team who have helped to organize this event.
First of all, my colleague Walter Grunsmike from the Technical University Dortmund really
set the ball rolling by inviting Elizabeth Rosner and her father to Germany and by letting
me know about this.
My gratitude then goes to the Consular General, of course, of the United States that provided
the funding.
Greg Strach from the American Center kindly agreed to host the event.
Thank you, Manfred, for that.
And Claudia Dickmann from the bookstore, Reuter and Klerkner offered to set up a bookstore,
not a book table, to sell copies from Elizabeth Rosner's books.
Lars Schmeinck and Julia Gauterman take care of videotaping and reading and discussion tonight.
So thank you for doing this.
Sophia Kuma, Harriet Gauterman, Rosaline Hoppe, and Iris Resma all helped in a multitude
of ways.
So my gratitude goes to all of you.
Thank you very much.
I would now like to introduce tonight's speakers.
Let me begin with Elizabeth Rosner.
Elizabeth graduated from Stanford University in 1981 and subsequently earned an MFA in
fiction from the University of California at Irvine in 1985 and a Master of Literary
Studies from the University of Queensland in Australia in 1990.
And I still want to hear something about that.
She has lived in California since 1978 and taught creative writing at the college level
for 20 years.
Elizabeth Rosner's first novel, The Speed of Light, from which she will be tonight,
debuted on the San Francisco Chronicle's bestseller list at number two and has received
awards and literary recognition in the U.S. as well as in Europe.
It was translated into 10 languages, is that true?
And one among others, the following prizes.
Le Prix, France, Blue Gironde in 2004, the Great Lakes Colleges Association,
the New Writer's Award in Fiction in 2002, and the Harold J. Ribelow Prize also in 2002.
Elizabeth Rosner is also an award-winning poet.
Her collection Gravity, published by Small Poetry Press, is in its 14th printing.
Her poems in short fiction have been widely published in literary magazines.
Elizabeth's second novel, Blue Nude, was published by Bellentine Books in 2006
and has, unfortunately, not yet been translated into Germans, but I heard their plans
by Walter Grunswijk to translate the book.
In her work, as we've already heard, Elizabeth explores the topic of the so-called
second generation survivors that is of children of survivors of the Holocaust.
This topic has created more or less a genre of its own in American literature,
and we will see which narrative strategies Elizabeth employs in dealing with this difficult topic.
Elizabeth Rosner's interest in the theme is not purely literary but has a background in reality
as she is the daughter of a survivor of Buchenwald.
We deeply appreciate that Karlheinz Rosner, Elizabeth's father, has agreed to be with us
tonight and to participate in the discussion, so thank you for being here.
Karlheinz Rosner, you already heard this, was born in Hamburg in 1929,
and I skip the description of your childhood because Mrs. Patterson has already talked about it,
so let me just skip this part and move on to the part which I don't understand,
because I don't understand much of what you're doing professionally, but I read it anyways.
I'm deeply impressed, an engineer, I don't understand this, but okay, listen to this.
Karlheinz Rosner is chairman and CEO of Cardio Merg Imaging Incorporated and founded the company in 1999.
He's also the principal founder of Intermagnetics General Corporation,
whose principal activities focus on the design, now listen to this,
design, development, manufacture and sale of superconductive MRI components
used in the medical diagnostic imaging marketplace.
Okay, so here is the author and co-author of many published papers on superconductive and electronic devices.
And Mr. Rosner holds several patents and is a well-known authority in his field.
In June of 2010, he was awarded the Center for Economic Growth Technology Entrepreneur Award.
And finally, I would like to introduce Susanne Poelmeijer.
Susanne Poelmeijer studied voice and acting at the Hamburger Schausbielschule.
She was engaged as an actor at several German theaters
and now lives and works in Hamburg as a freelance singer and actress.
And now we will hear the reading from the English original, The Speed of Lights,
and then from Peter Spindichkeit, Tess Licht.
Thank you so much for the introduction.
And I just want to extend again my thank yous to all of the people who made this evening possible.
It's something that I've been wanting to do for a very long time
and it took a series of miracles and magical collaborations to make it happen.
So thank you all.
Rather than repeat the names, there's a hum.
It's not me.
And I want to thank all of you for coming this evening.
It means a lot to me to see a group of faces out in the room.
There's something about reading aloud from one's work
that is only successful when there are people in the room listening.
So thank you for listening.
And I want to say a couple of things before I start to explain.
If you were holding the book in your hands and looking at it,
you would see that the book actually consists of three distinct voices that alternate telling the story.
They each tell their own stories.
So the three characters that the Consul General so kindly described to you
each has his or her own typeface in the book.
And that was intended to help you track when the voices shift.
So what you'll be hearing is actually not one voice but several voices.
And the pleasure of hearing English and German alternatingly
will add, I hope, to the braided effect that the book contains.
And the last thing I want to say just as a courtesy to my father
is to let you all know that the father in this novel is not my father.
He often wants people to know that.
So I will do that for him.
So this is an imagined story.
But I sometimes describe it as a book that is emotionally autobiographical
rather than factually autobiographical.
So it contains a very deep sense of familiarity for me in the inner sense.
The changes began on a Wednesday.
Mierkoles, the day that sounds like miracles.
My younger and only sister Paula had gone away,
leaving the apartment directly below mine to test the reach of her voice.
I stayed behind with my 11 televisions waiting for her to come back.
I was teaching myself not to feel.
In the room with the televisions, there were no voices.
I had silenced them all.
Instead, I heard a clock that ticked like a snapping twig,
the hum and push of cars passing on the street,
a neighbor's dog barking at the arrival of mail,
the refrigerator purring, my own breath in and out,
all the rhythms in and out.
And inside my head, a melody from before,
when my sister trained her voice to soar,
when I listened to the notes float and resonate,
I believed sometimes that I could see them.
Paula was auditioning, sending her hopeful music
into the arms of Copenhagen, Prague, Vienna,
places I had never seen and never expected to.
I lived in the safe embrace of my apartment,
whose windows overlooked a park and a playground and a street.
I had collected broken televisions and fixed them one by one,
sometimes guessing at the way to put things back together.
I had no manuals to follow, no map.
I made good guesses.
I had a feel for these things, a kind of blind instinct.
In the end, they all worked, although the colors were never exactly right.
Some were always a little too green, others a little too violet.
It didn't matter.
The scratchy growl of their voices didn't matter either
because I often kept them very quiet.
I spent most of my time watching the images,
letting them tell me stories.
I let them distract me from every terrible truth
until nothing touched me at all.
It was never a decision, never something I asked for.
It simply belonged to me, like a second skin.
No, like my only skin.
There was no choice, no letting go.
And if there had been the chance to refuse, if I'd been asked,
I would still say yes.
I was my father's grief.
It was what he gave to me, his only son.
He didn't mean to, but it came to me without his permission.
He gave up his language and his homeland, everything he could leave behind,
but he carried his sadness with him, under his skin, like blood.
It wasn't his fault.
He would have taken it back if he could,
but it was mine now, as if I had lived it all.
At times, even my dreams felt inherited,
as if someone else had owned them first.
There would be dogs barking,
murderous voices in the distance, smoke filling the dark air.
His actual stories, I never heard.
My father held all the shards of glass inside,
where the edges cut him to pieces.
When he looked at me, it was not so much into my eyes as through them,
as if I were a clear window to the past.
I looked back at him.
I listened to the wordless dark.
What else could I do?
I believed this was what I was here for,
to be the receiver of that gaze, to swallow it completely.
The broken glass, I swallowed that too.
Here is what I knew how to do, how to get away,
how to save myself by taking flight, by vanishing.
My voice was a ticket of escape, one way to anywhere but where I was.
I tried to take my brother Julian with me to help him escape too,
but it was more weight than I could carry.
Only one of us could make it out alive.
I didn't choose myself, not exactly, but the truth was,
I had a ticket and he didn't.
I had to use it or die.
I had to take my brother Julian with me to help him.
I had to take my brother with me to help him.
I had to take him with me.
I had to take him with me to help him.
I had to take him with me.
I had to take him with me to help him.
I had to take him with me to help started the?
I didn't want to hurt him and forget him,
We will never forget the fact that this is the right thing to do.
We will never forget the fact that I am the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one.
We will never forget the fact that this is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who
is the only one who is the only one who is
the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one who is the only one
I am very happy to be with you today, because I am very happy to be with you today.
I am very happy to be with you today.
We are very happy.
I am very happy to be with you today.
I'm very happy to be with you today.
I love you a lot.
You also are a properlyartist, WHY MEAN you are not a artist.
But you always wanted to do something with me,
to possibly throw a whole other start,
where you are not Forge namely.
I love what I do every day.
My earliest memory is the sound of crying. My father waking up from a nightmare. Or was
it my brother? A nameless sobbing in the dark. Julian told me I cooed like a bird before
I learned to speak. I made my mouth into an o and I began, with no reason, to sing. When
I was still very young before my mother died, we kept a pair of canaries in a cage by the
kitchen window. At night, the cage was covered with a towel. Such a simple script. In the
daylight they sang and at night they slept. I used to wonder if they knew that outside
the window lay a world they could never reach. My father was a child, but my father was a
child. My father was a child, but my brother was a child. My father was a child. My father
was a child. My father was a child. My father was a child. My father was a child. My father
got a child. A child was employees due to no fee. The Their cries were milked only
by their children. Their death was empty and the
scholarship left was buried a huge dump in the
families with no time till now.
I loved those rare moments, I was able to make him smile, the way his face cracked into
lines and his eyes squeezed almost closed with pleasure.
Whatever had happened to him back there, during the war, was wrapped in silence.
So I filled the house with music, I tried to give him joy.
Mostly though, his joy was as hidden from us as his past.
The childhood he must have had, but never described to us.
Something told me not to ask, not to wonder out loud, and eventually I stopped wondering
altogether.
I focused instead on my mother, imitating the way she danced to the music that poured
from a radio on the kitchen counter, the way she sang to me her sleepy, wordless tunes
at night.
I learned the names of the notes from her.
I learned how to sing in the dark.
I learned how to sing in the dark, but I didn't know what to do.
This time I filled the house with music.
I was afraid of it all.
For the first time, I was afraid of getting out of the house with my mother.
I didn't know how to get out of the house, and I didn't know what to do.
I didn't know what to do, and I didn't know how to get out of the house with my mother.
And with that said, I was afraid of getting out of the house with my mother.
I was afraid of getting out of the house with my mother.
I was afraid of the music, of the radio, of the kitchen counter.
I was afraid of getting out of the house with my mother.
This is the third voice now, Sola.
Learning a new language for the names of things in the world brings me back into my hands.
I touch a table and say, table.
Hold a piece of bread to my lips and say the word bread.
It is the way to think of everything right now, like the world gets created over and
over as I look at it and place my fingers on its surfaces.
No names from yesterday or the years before this one, as if nothing is true except this
moment, table, bread, river.
Now I am sleeping and now I am awake.
I wash the dishes and dry them with a blue towel.
I cut my fingernails and brush my teeth.
The sun pours circles of light onto the floor.
A lemon sits in a white bowl.
Water boils on the stove.
I drink coffee from a mug the color of the ocean.
The kitchen faucet drips three times and stops.
Julian's footsteps move across the ceiling over my head.
Today is Wednesday.
The sky is wearing a gray dress.
Rain leans against the window.
I am climbing the stairs of the river, one at a time, one at a time.
I am sleeping and now I am awake for the next day in the world.
I don't know what to do with my hands.
I breathe on my lips and say, table.
I breathe on my lips and say, bread.
I think I am here and now I am awake.
I am awake and now I am awake.
I am sleeping and now I am awake.
I am not going to be able to breathe.
I am breathing.
I am not going to be able to breathe.
I drink coffee from a mug.
I drink coffee from a mug and two bags.
I drink a lot of coffee for rockets mid
each day, holding their symbol of the ocean.
ahead in the book now and there's a fourth voice that begins somewhere in
the second chapter and it's the voice of a dictionary of scientific terms that
Julian is editing so you're going to hear one of the definitions. Alternating
current. A flow of electricity that after reaching a maximum in one direction
decreases, finally reversing and reaching a maximum in the opposite
direction. The cycle being repeated continuously. If I could have gone
backwards, reversing everything about my life, would I start over, erase it all?
And if not all, what would I keep? The nights of lying with my head on my
father's barrel chest, listening to his heartbeat until I was asleep, and then
barely conscious being carried in his arms back to my own bed, wouldn't I keep
that? What if when Paula was born I had remained silent? Or what if Paula had
been born first and I was the one who began singing before I had words? Would
my voice be the one pouring into the ears of Budapest right now? Once, in
secret, I wrote with blue ink the date of my birth on the inside of my forearm.
When I scrubbed at it with soap and water, fading it more and more until it
vanished, I imagined what it would be like to make the pain and the sorrow
disappear like that too. When my father's language remained submerged in silence,
was he erasing his past, trying to stop the current? Instead, the flow continued
electric and relentless in me. There was a survivor visiting our house who had
had her tattoo removed, burned away. But I still saw a scar, a mark to show that
something had been there, some echo still carved beneath her skin. What we hold on
to we can't choose, reversing and reaching a maximum in the opposite
direction and the cycle repeating continuously without our permission.
We don't know what's going on in the beginning. All is ours. And when we don't, we
don't know what's going on. We don't know what's going on in the middle of the
night when the father's words and the father's words are in the right direction.
We don't know what's going on in the middle of the night. We don't know what's going on in the
back of the room. We don't know what's going on. We don't know what's going on.
We don't know what's going on. We don't know what's going on in the back of the room.
And what's going on in the back of the room? And what's going on in the back of the room?
And what's going on in the back of the room?
What's going on in the back of the room?
And what's going on in the back of the room?
This is the last piece we're going to read and it's from the section where we begin to find out
what Sola's history is, the woman from Central America.
Esta de lor, Diego said, necesita una vos, suvos, this sorrow needs your voice.
Sola looked at him, Diego lifted his hands to his heart. El silencio maguyo el corazon, he said.
The verb was a new one for me. I turned to ask Sola what it meant and saw tears on her cheeks,
shining rivers of salt. Bruises, she whispered without my asking. Silence bruises the heart.
If that was true, I thought my father's heart must have been completely black and blue from a
lifetime of wordless grief banging around in his chest. At once I pictured myself moving so quickly,
I'd be through the door before anyone knew what had happened. But nobody stirred. Sola's rivers
poured down without making a sound. Far away, across oceans and continents, Paula was singing
in a hall filled with light. At first I could see how Sola didn't want to tell Diego her story. I
imagined bands tight around her heart, a conviction she had to keep the story inside in order to save
him from its truth. I knew it so well, that fierce refusal, like some permanently wrapped gift, but a
gift the receiver wanted to exchange, the truth instead of silence. My father had given us the
same gift and inside the silence, the knives were sharp anyway. That was the part he couldn't or
wouldn't understand. I was cut open by that silence and I knew Diego needed Sola's words the way I
needed them to. We were all black holes, dense with the nightmares we invent when the stories
are kept hidden from us. Paula had filled the silence with her own voice and I had filled it
with the voices of science and the electronic air and what we really needed was the voice of our
father telling us his story, giving us at least that much of himself, the life he'd nearly lost.
But he couldn't speak. The horror was bigger than anything he could name with words and we were left
to find out for ourselves what had been burned into his skin forever. Esta de lor, sácte Diego.
Necessita una vos, suvos. Lissas leit brauchtane shtimmel. Sola zain an. Diego hopes an
ender an zhertz. El silencio maguia el corazón sácte air. Lissas vod van noi fömig. Alts ich mich
mit efragge nach sain a be dolte, be dolte un ganzula wenden wolte, be meigt ich trännen af ieren wangen.
Glensen des alds flüsser. Blaue fläcken, flüsser des ierunen meine fragge. Schweiden, be shert ich das
hertz. When das das wahit en sprach, müster mein fahta an mit blaugerunen fläcken lber zet des hertz ge habe
darben. Das egepne seine slieben slangen Wartlösen kumas, der zen seine brüster te schlarden
lassen. Söfart malte ich me aus, wie ich wieder blitz zu türen aus wierer nog eer einer
aunen wüster wasser wasser zwär. Wacke keiner ich des ich. Lautlös strömten zhölle seits
flüsser. Enweiter fernen, jens seit van oetse hännen on kontinänten zang pauler. Zang pauler
zu evenen einem licht du ich flüsser zen zaal. Unfengtliche, kontig faschteen werung zhölle
ere geschichte diego nicht atse een wolte. Ich stalt meir mit eisen bändernum wiggledes
hertz fohr. Wie fästüt wär zuigung, sie müsser die geschichteum jeden präiss füssich beiten,
om een föder wärheits zuschützen. Wie gut ich das kante, die zis fahweigen mit aller
aucht. Wie ein föh imme fär päktus geschink, das se im fänger, aba liebe umtauchen möchte.
Die wärheit anstele van schweigen. Mein färter hat hänts das selebe geschink,
een mächte, aba die mässer im tiefsten innen geschweigen zwahren den ochshäff.
Dort ist hein kontel und wolte en icht föstien. Die zeschweigen haten mit auf geschlützen.
And ich wöstel gegel prärter zolaz wärter gen nausen nutich wie ich.
Wie aller wahren schwärter löchher in den in sich, die von uns efunden an auf gremme fättichten.
Wie mein uns die geschichten föhren tällt.
Paohlärter die zeschweigen mit ich eigen und schtimmer ausge föld,
wie im ich sie mit auschpärter wissenschaft und te electronic föld.
Dort und werklichkeit, brauchten widdie schtimmer und schwätters.
Der uns eine geschichte ausseld. Und uns, der mit wennigstens eine kleinen teilfon zieslebstkeit.
Fon gienem lieben, das er beiner fahloren hette.
Er aubach konten ich sprechen.
Dass en zetzen wagrusser aus alles, fass emit wertan ausstreken kontte.
Und so musn wie aus weisen, alein herrausfünden, wass ich für immer in sine haute einde bran tätte.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Thank you very much. Thank you so much for listening so quietly.
And don't worry, you will get the chance to ask questions, but I would actually like to start with a more technical question.
And one of the things that I particularly like about your novel is that you employ really three narrative perspectives,
and then you even have a fourth level, and I was wondering, sort of the language of science,
and I would like to hear more about this, you know, what is the function in your interpretation of this multi-perspectivity?
And also, is there something that you want to establish a contrast between the more subjective voices of those who narrate history,
and the more objective voice of science that has, you know, entrance here and there throughout the text?
And I was just wondering, I really like it, you know, these three narrative perspectives, but, you know, what was your decision of employing this narrative technique?
You know, I often feel like I'm making a big confession when I talk about how this book got made.
And in some ways, I think the book is smarter than I am. And I say that really out of humility, that my writing process
at times was very unconscious, and that I was really allowing the story to tell itself to me.
And when I found that, I thought at first that Julian would own the story, that it would be Julian's story,
and that we would hear about his sister, and we would hear about this third character, Sola.
But I kept on finding that Julian wasn't big enough to hold the whole story himself,
and that we needed really to hear Paula's voice directly, and we needed to hear Sola's voice directly.
But I myself have a very short attention span. So I would write the book in very small sections,
and it would be, I would hear one of their voices for a while, and then that voice would stop speaking.
And either I had to shift to another voice, or I had to just stop writing for the day.
And so the voices kind of came and went in a braid on their own.
And the science came in later, because when I realized that Julian was a scientist,
I got very nervous about being able to write in a scientific mind without being a scientist myself.
So my solution was to visit my father and look at his library, which was shelf after shelf of
science books, and just start randomly pulling science books off the wall. And I found this
fantastic dictionary of science, and I thought, I need to learn a language, I need to learn a new
vocabulary. So I opened up this science dictionary at random, and I started reading these definitions,
and to me, they sounded like poetry. They were beautiful. I didn't understand them,
sort of like what Professor Rohr was doing when she was describing my father's work.
And so I thought, maybe these just become part of the novel themselves as definitions, that they
become symbolic of something that's both mysterious and directly related to what's
happening in the story. And so they come in and out, but at first, the book was full of them.
I fell in love with so many definitions. And I would do this. I would open the science dictionary
and go like this. And then I would see what my finger was pointing to, and it was perfect.
It belonged exactly where I need it. So I had too many of them. And when I first
began to work with an editor at Random House, when they were going to publish the book, he said,
you have to get rid of some of these definitions. There are too many of them.
So I had to be very selective and only keep the ones that really fit. But I also recognized that
there would be some readers who would read them and find them completely confusing and just sort
of skim over them and say, I want to get back to the story. What's happening with these characters?
So at one point, I literally had the book spread out on the floor of my living room in all these
different pieces. And it was like a mosaic or a puzzle. And I had to find the places where
things fit. So you give me much more credit than I deserve by having this narrative strategy.
But in the end, it really did feel like the story told me how to tell it, that the characters
themselves were teaching me the way that this book needed to be put together.
Thank you very much. I would like to stay for a second with the imagery or the symbolism
actually in your text. And you know, I think what can you tell if you're also writing poetry,
because you know, some of them are just so lovely. And is this mic working properly now?
Okay. And I would just like to know, you know, there's one image that I find just masterful,
and it tells us a lot. It's like a concentration of what being a second generation survivor can
really mean. And this is, you know, the character of Julian with his 11 television screens, you know,
that are on day and night, and sometimes they're silent. And I really do adore, you know, this
image. And this young man is depicted almost like as it's suffering from autism. And I was just
wondering how you yourself, you know, because I could just teach a whole seminar, you know,
on just this image, but how you yourself interpret it, you know, you could interpret it as an image
of, you know, post-modernity and the medialization of reality and, you know, whatnot. But how you
yourself interpret this very powerful image of these continuously blinking TV screens.
In all honesty, that image arrived. It was the beginning of the book when that image came to me.
And I saw this young man in an apartment, I saw this wall of televisions, and they were stacked
sort of unevenly. They're old televisions, so they're not sleek looking at all. They're kind
of awkward and boxy. And all I could think about was wanting to understand who he was and why he
was in this room with these televisions. It seemed there was obviously, well, maybe not obviously,
I'd known no one with 11 televisions. He wasn't based on anyone in my life. He wasn't based on
a memory or an experience or an encounter. And so he became a little bit of a fixation for me,
for me to puzzle my way inside this image. And I was asking myself
a lot of questions about him psychologically. And mostly I thought, what is he hiding from?
Why is he choosing to only receive the world in this mediated way, in this indirect way?
What is he afraid of encountering out in the real world? Or what is he choosing or needing to
control about information that he can turn the dials all the time, that he can affect what he
takes in? And then also because I think I had this experience and many people probably have,
there's a way that television is a numbing strategy that we have. So what was he using
the televisions to numb himself from? And that's why there's that line I was teaching myself not
to feel. So the televisions become a kind of drug really. And so it was my pursuit of those
questions that really launched the whole story. Because then I thought, well, you can't really
survive in the world alone like that in your room with television. So who helps him in his life? Oh,
he has a sister. Oh, she lives downstairs. What does she do? Why is she downstairs? And how is
she different from him? Oh, she goes out into the world singing. And for all of his contraction and
silence, if she's his opposite, then she's full of noise. But it's happy. So this was my inner
machinery that's really the magic of creativity, I think, when you don't know the answers and you're
searching for answers. And when I develop characters, really the two most important
questions I think about with characters are they're very simple, but they're not easy. And the two
questions are, what do you want? What are you afraid of? And I ask those questions over and over
again. And sometimes I would just make lists of Julian's fears because he's obviously a very phobic
person. So he had page after page of fears. And those lists fascinated me because they weren't
my fears. They were truly his. But I also say when I said earlier that the book is emotionally
autobiographical, I recognize him. He's some part of me that I know about. I feel a little bit more
on the surface like his sister Paula. I can go out into the world. This is my equivalent of singing,
you know, that I go out into the world and speak. But I'm not only her and I'm not only him. I'm some
combination. And Sola for me became the third ingredient that was in some ways the balance
between the two that she in the novel really demonstrates that it's possible to hold your past
but live in the present. And that's really the offering she provides as in some ways the solution,
even though she also has an incredibly traumatic and painful story to tell.
Thank you. Mr. Rosner, now I would like to ask you the following question. You know,
I've done quite a lot of research on representations of the Holocaust and also on questions of the
so-called Americanization of the Holocaust. You know, there's one discussion, particularly in
America, that deals with the so-called second generation survivors. And that asks questions
like, you know, is it possible to inherit memory? There's even the expression of a prosthetic
memory. And there's the question of, you know, can you inherit grief? This is a discussion that
is actually, you know, more or less bound to the American context. And sometimes I find it truly
confusing. And I would like to know, you know, how do you feel about questions like these? Can
one inherit a grief? Can one inherit a memory? Is there, in your opinion, is there something
like a second generation survivor? How do you feel about it? Well, that's a difficult question
and you're right. It's really being asked in America a lot because most of the survivors
are in the 80s and 90s and most of them actually aren't alive anymore. And yet this was such a
horrific event. It is a very strong feeling across the communities in the United States.
How do you remember this? How this has to be remembered so that it won't be repeated again
and that you can teach people what really happened and how bad people can behave. Even
a civilized nation like Germany can evolve in something that is as horrible as that.
And furthermore, there is a little bit of a direct connection, obviously.
Children that grew up with Holocaust survivors can't help that their children feel a little bit
funny and a little different. Even my children felt originally that when we came to the United
States and they grew up and were at school, my daughter keeps telling me that all of a sudden,
when she was, I don't know, in her eight or ten years old, that she discovered that her parents
had an accent. They weren't normally speaking people. I was seven.
So it's that sort of thing. And of course also, most survivors spoke another language and that
was another thing that in the United States is not the most prolific thing anymore. Languages
are not forced on children anymore, even though it is a good idea to know lots of languages.
And so there's a different environment that surrounds survivors. But I think the driving
force comes from the fact that there's an absolute essential feeling that this kind of
experience that some survivors had have to be remembered. And of course, the best way to remember
is through your family who have maybe records. But the beauty of Elizabeth's book is that she
imagines and feels to some extent like a second-generation survivor. And especially in most of
the early years, although she is right, I never felt that this should be kept a secret myself.
I told my children, in fact, I took them to concentration camp to show them what happened
and so forth. But it is the fact that many, many survivors could not really talk about this
experience. It was such a shocking part of their life. And even I always know that whenever I
remember it, it's an emotional, difficult period for me to think about it and to believe that
something has happened. So it's a very difficult subject. It's not this straightforward. Yes, they
do remember. You should remember. And it's a very difficult transition. And the most effective way,
of course, is for people who have like my myself, talk about it still, display it and explain how
they felt and what happened to them specifically. But the fact of the matter is that this is where
there is a strong drive, that the second generation feels more strongly, that they have to remember
their parents' difficulties and also tell the story to the world so it won't be forgotten.
And it won't be repeated, especially. That is, of course, everybody's objective,
that this is a kind of thing that really, really has to be understood to be so terrible
and so difficult where six million people were killed in a relatively short period of time. In
fact, when I give talks about my experience to school children, I tell them, can you imagine
that 10 times the size of this town are wiped out within a year or that one and a quarter million
children were literally killed drastically without any mercy? I mean, these things are unimaginable.
And that's why it's such a difficult subject to be able to even talk about it. And I can understand
there are many survivors who perhaps had much more difficult periods than I have. I was lucky
in that I was only in concentration camp for 10 months and I was lucky to be survived and lucky
to survive. In fact, every survivor that survived has a special story. There's no question about
that. You survive because of special circumstances, because there was such a systematic and determined
effort to kill all everybody that only through luck did you survive or some special circumstance.
So it's a kind of subject that I still have trouble with personally and I want to make sure that it
does get remembered and repeated. And the second generation process is the best way of doing it
because here the children have a direct connection with it and it helps them to remember their
parents also after they go. Can I comment on that also? I was actually fascinated by the question
because often when I give presentations in the United States about my work, I refer to Germany
as being a place that encourages the conversation now. And in fact, I remember, I don't know the
word, but I often say that in German there's a word that means intergenerational transmission
of trauma and that it was a coined word in Germany. Did I make that up? Is there no word
like that? It's a long word. Yeah, no, nobody recognizes it. Intergenerational transmission
of trauma. I've been telling a falsehood all these years. But when I was starting to write
about my family's story, I met a woman in London who was part of a movement of so-called second
generation and that includes, I should say, children of survivors who were born immediately
after the war. There was a generation of people that were born in displaced persons camps and to
parents immediately after the war. I was born on the last day of the 50s, so there was a bit of a
time lapse since the end of the war. So the second generation is a little bit of a murky
term in a way, but this woman in London was doing a program that she called the presence of the
absence. She was actually working in Vienna and Austria with the program because especially in
Austria, she said they were really avoiding the subject, that it was very easy to point the finger
at Germany and say, well, Germany has to deal with this, but we're blameless. But the presence of
the absence was this feeling of the unspoken responsibility and the ghosts that they weren't
really talking about. So in some ways, I think, and when this book was translated into French,
the French were very proud to change the title of the book, actually, and they called it
Demons on Their Shoulders. And there's a line that Julian in the book says,
it amazed me to think that other people didn't walk around with demons on their shoulders.
And my French editor said, oh, the speed of light is such an American title.
You know, it's too optimistic. And in France, we know the weight of history. And we're going to,
you know, we're going to use this title in France because we're more committed to history than
Americans. And so in some ways, I think Americans can't be given credit for remembering all that
well, even though, obviously, personally, I take it as a very enormous and important obligation.
Yeah, and in this context, I have a question to maybe both of you. And that is,
by now, we already speak about the third generation of survivors. If you think of
Jonathan Safran IV's Everything is Illuminated, for instance, I mean, what happens in these texts
is that the whole historical event in these novels gets more and more fictionalized by necessity.
And there are pros and cons. I mean, this is a very complicated discussion. And I was just
wondering how you feel about if sort of the event itself gets more and more fictionalized. I mean,
how could it not? The third generation now writes about it. Is that a good thing in your opinion? Or
is this dangerous? Or I mean, does it help in keeping the memories alive? Or does it distort,
say, the pedagogical purpose of this kind of literature?
But again, you are a professor, you can probably answer that question.
But I think that whatever way it really is remembered in a constructive way that really has
positive outcomes is okay. And obviously, people that didn't live through it can't really
talk about it or write about it in a way that it really happens. So if the fictionalization
happens, and of course, this book has some fictionalization as well, it just depends on
the way it's presented. And does it make sense? And does it make the impact that really it should
have in order to make sure that people remember what happened and watch out for it and watch out
for other people? Of course, unfortunately, it's still happening in the world, of course,
that bad things happen. But as you say, it can't be helped that there's more and more
fictionalization coming in. As long as it's not translated into beautiful kind of developments
and positive things that introduce it or even deny it as being done as well. You see, which is
that people, and the denial is not too surprising in that it's so impossible to imagine that this
sort of thing, systematic killing, could have happened by a society that knew what it was doing
and did it with the purpose and systematically. So the fictionalization, I think, as long as it
has this constructive and educational perspective, although you can't control that, of course, but
as you say, it's bound to happen. I was very aware, as I was writing this book and other things I've
written, that I don't have the right to truly inhabit the inside of a survivor story. And that
as close as I am to my father, and I should say my mother also was a survivor who was in the Vilna
ghetto as a child and then in hiding. She survived the war in hiding. That my very self-conscious
awareness was that I can only speak about being the recipient of the story and not being the one
who lived through the story. So it's necessarily mediated, at least, whether the fiction
becomes more and more elaborate or not isn't so much the point for me as it is
to make sure that I am not representing myself as knowing more than I know. And that's why this
book is so much about the limits to what you can really know and that you can hear the story
from someone who lived through it, but then what you carry is the story, not the experience.
And those are very different things, I think. And so when I feel that I'm somehow carrying
my parents' stories, for example, now that my mother's no longer alive, whatever pieces of
her story I know are all that's left of her experience in the form of this story. And
as you say, as the generations get farther and farther removed, the ones who don't even know
the survivor directly but are only receiving the story of the survivor, eventually we will lose
that direct connection with the human story. And that's why I feel such an urgency about
sharing as widely as possible the firsthand testimony as much as you can. And then eventually
when all you have is the secondhand story, then you focus on that and so on. But even I feel
somewhat uncomfortable with the fictionalized story because the magical qualities come in or
as you say, it becomes beautiful. But remember when the movie Life is Beautiful came out? I don't
know how many of you saw that. But as soon as I saw it, I called my parents and I said,
you have to see this movie. And I was very eager to hear what you had to say because that film,
as everybody knows, was very controversial in its portrayal of camp life with this comedic
sort of central character. And I remember when my parents came home from the film, I said,
please call me after you've seen it. And you said it was actually very accurate.
You said that it really seemed very authentic in its depiction of the camp. And yet there were
some film critics who were appalled by it and were declaring it a travesty. And I kept on wanting
to say, but my father says, and he knows. And so there was sort of this artistic righteousness
about how dare they. And yet someone who was there said, no, there was a real honesty to it.
So it's a complicated question you're asking. Yeah. Thank you. I would now like to invite your
questions if there are any more comments. Manfred, you said you have another portable mic,
so maybe we can use it now. And are there questions from the audience? Yeah.
Hello. I was in Jerusalem in 1980. And I remember standing outside the general post office
and a man coming up to me and starting telling me things that seem to be in the form of jokes,
but were actually very harrowing stories from the camps. And when my friends came to pick me up,
they told me that he'd been a comedian and that he now transmitted his stories,
his experiences by talking to tourists and telling them about it. And I was wondering
how you feel about passing on these, in part, very harrowing stories to further generations.
And do you feel that you're passing on an emotional burden to your daughter? And do you
feel that you can pass this on to future generations without, to future Jewish generations,
without somehow affecting them in their lives very deeply and in an emotionally negative way?
Well, as I was trying to say, I think it's important to pass the story on.
Extremely important. And so whatever way works, because it turns out that 95 or 98% of the people
don't even know about what happened, especially not in detail. And so the more there are people
who are willing to expose themselves, because it is a very emotionally difficult
requirement for you to do that. But on the other hand, it is really, really critical
that people that know transmitted. And so I have no bad feelings about that. And I
admire that particular person to be willing to do that, because that is a difficulty. And it turns
also out that the best way to transmit somebody's experience is, of course, indirectly telling.
Unfortunately, today, I was talking about it, many youngsters don't read books anymore.
So how, and they might occasionally watch snippets of TV and so forth. But the best communication
in any sphere of life is to direct personal communication. So I'm all in favor of that.
Thank you for sharing that. I know it was hard to say. I find in my experience that
some people have told me that it's actually easier for survivors to tell stories to people who aren't
members of their own family. And that I actually found, because where I was growing up, my parents
had a circle of friends, many of whom were survivors, they sort of found each other in this
town in upstate New York, and created a very tight-knit community. And after my book was
published, some of my parents' friends approached me saying, now I'm ready to tell my story, but I
want to tell it to you. I couldn't tell it to my children. And so what I understood was that
that emotional connection overwhelmed their ability to tell the story. And that in some ways,
you could retain a little more, not neutrality exactly, but maybe a sense of containment or
self-control in the telling of the story if you were speaking to a stranger. But the psychological
impact that you're talking about is extremely nuanced. And I think sometimes the psyche just
so protects itself that the story becomes blocked. My mother, for example, often said she couldn't
remember, that she just didn't have the memories available to her. And whether it was that she
didn't want to remember, or that they were suppressed, or whether... Because there were
times when she would start to speak and she would become so upset that we would all tell her to
stop. We would ask her not... I mean, she would stop herself or we would change the subject or
something. It was clearly causing too much pain. And my father, I think, had, at least it seemed to
me, an ability to sort of compartmentalize the experiences in ways where he could shield himself
from the trauma of remembering. It was a kind of post-traumatic stress to go back into the story.
And there was a time when I was asking him so many questions that he actually said,
can we talk about something else now? And it was the first time I realized that I was traumatizing
him by asking questions. So it's very delicate. You need the story, you want the story, you want
to go to the source, you want to go to the original storyteller, but then you want to protect
them from suffering or madness or whatever they're gonna be experiencing by sharing it. So
when I wrote this book about a silent family or a silent survivor, it was because I was meeting
people of my generation who would say, oh, I was 18 when I found out my parents had been in camps.
And I would think, what was it like those first 18 years of your life? What did you talk about?
When you were sitting around the dinner table, weren't there all sorts of things that weren't
being said, but you could feel them hovering over the table? And that was when I thought,
no, the silence in some ways is even heavier than the story. And yet, I have so much compassion for
people who just can't share it. It's important because they'll go mad.
Thank you. Are there other questions that you would like to ask?
Thank you. My name is David. I'm an American journalist living here in Hamburg.
My question, I was also recently in Israel, had a chance to meet with some European Jews
from France, Belgium, specifically in Amsterdam, Holland. And they said that they did not feel
comfortable living in those countries that experienced a lot of antisemitism in the last
couple of years. And because of that made Aliyah and moved to Israel. 65 years later, we say it
should never happen again. And yet there seems to be certain countries, not specifically in Germany,
but in other Western European countries where that's happening. What is your reaction when you
hear those kind of stories? And is that even being talked about in the United States media?
Do you want me to? I think so. In particular, since obviously as some of these survivors get
older, especially those that were able to leave Germany before the war, they still have good
feelings. And so have I. I mean, I still remember some good years in my, when I was growing up
before the war and before Hitler came to power, although I wasn't old enough to know that. But I
always, until the concentration camp, I had a reasonably good feeling about Germany. And I
know my mother was such a enormously loving person of German literature, German art and everything
else, that she actually had an emotional shock to being driven out of Germany and losing her
business. And yet the thing that I personally feel, when I first came back to Hamburg,
I couldn't stay. I couldn't make it because it was still in the late fifties or early sixties.
But today I feel, and this is why there is a change, that the younger German generation
has a much more realistic perspective and what their parents did or didn't do and should have
done and are willing to make amends. Whereas the older generation just felt, well, let's forget
about it. Hitler did it. We were no part of it. They disclaimed, although I know certainly that
most people knew about it and did nothing about it. So there is a really transition happening today.
But I can see where people at first didn't want to go back to this country and couldn't
live in those countries. And today I think there is a difference. Although there is an
emergent anti-Semitism, of course, it's made more difficult by the Islamic attention that is being
given to them and the interaction there. So it's a complicated question that you're asking.
Just to clarify, the families I'm talking about, they left because of what they experienced
five years ago, not six years ago, specifically in France.
Well, that is everybody's afraid. Will it happen again? Can it happen again? Because human beings
are human beings. And so people that experienced it or whose parents experienced it are always
afraid. There's always a danger. You never think that it will never happen again. And that's why
it's so important to keep it. But people are now afraid that things may repeat. And this is
a constant question in the Jewish community. Even a question that I've heard is can it happen in the
United States, what happened in Germany? And my answer to that is no, the United States can't
happen. Because the United States, I think, is more open-minded, at least what I experienced.
The United States is a very unusual country because it opens its door to the world, in a
sense. And there's no really dominating society as it was in some of the European countries.
I lived in Sweden for a number of years. And it was very difficult. I liked Sweden. I went to
university in Sweden also. But it was very difficult to feel at home in another country.
And the situation that I think you are referring to is, in fact, this constant concern and being
afraid. It may happen again. It may happen here. Because there's a renewed anti-Semitism. And it
doesn't take that much of a population to turn a switch. And that's why people, I think, are
moving to Israel. I just have a quick response because I want some other questions as well.
In my experience, there's a rise in extremism around the world. And it's not only anti-Semitism.
There's misogyny on the rise in the United States at this moment. Women are fighting for their
rights to retain legal contraception. And I mean, these are just shocking developments in my
lifetime. So I think it's not that I don't think anti-Semitism is a particularly personal and
important subject given my family history. But I think that the problems of extremism and the
problems of hate speech and the problems of violence are global issues about how we are
evolving as human beings. And in all humility, my work as a writer in this book, as well as Blue
Nude, which we haven't mentioned too much yet, these are my offers of peacemaking, really,
is that by telling the stories and by humanizing our experiences and humanizing each other,
that's how we contradict or work against the rise of anti-Semitism and misogyny and racism of all
kinds. Those are complicated issues that face us all as human beings. So thank you for the question.
Yeah. For another question. Yeah. Wait, wait for the mic.
About hatred. Did you have ever the chance to get peace in yourself?
To forgive? What happened? Well, I probably can never forgive the perpetrators.
I can forgive. And I kept telling people, I lived in Germany, of course, till 1944, as you know,
free. And I know that a lot of people knew that people, that Jews were persecuted. But I don't
think, and I kept saying, I don't think that all Germans knew that Jews were systematically
exterminated. And they don't believe that. So I forgive those people that really
were, in a sense, indirect bystanders and didn't know. Hopefully, if they had known,
they would have done something about it. But as you know, the Nazis were very secretive and,
but yet a lot of people knew about it. And the fact that they did not speak up and Jews were
persecuted, their apartments and businesses were taken away and all of their whatever they owned
were taken away and they were sent away. They'd never asked. They didn't did that. And that I
can't forgive. I think a society that doesn't care about each other is not a society that I can
forgive. I think a society has to really think about other people. And that's, I think, a struggle
in the United States. There's a fairly large fraction, I think, that everybody care about
themselves. It's not our obligation to care about anybody else. And I think that's the attitude that
was here. But so I have a level of forgiveness, but certainly not forgiveness to the fundamental
issues that happened. Okay, so let's see. Yes, except for your patience. I really, I'm sorry that
our answers were so long. So I want to hear the questions and then I think maybe you can ask
the two of them. We can combine them and then there'll be the last two questions.
I've been debating whether or not to even bring this up, but for me the recent criticism of
Gondag Ras came as a relief because I felt that it was sort of finally someone spoke out with this
criticism of the Israeli government, criticism of the German government's reaction to the Israeli
government and their whole policy. And I recognize that at the same time there is a certain
definite disrespect in his wording of his criticism. However, I'm wondering,
it's very important that people are able to, even Germans, are able to criticize
what the Israeli government is doing now. How does this play a role in your,
to both of your experiences? And did you find it disrespectful and did you find this inappropriate?
Well, I basically have two short questions. First of all, by introducing your third character,
Sola, you seem to make up or to introduce a comparison between the Holocaust and other
genocides. So did you ever have to face criticism for that comparison? And my second question
actually addresses the use of symbolism. So when you tell me that your publisher in France
thought that your title was just too positive and too optimistic and you had to change it,
I'm just thinking, when I read the novel, I didn't have the impression that, you know, light
or the metaphor of light was really exclusively associated with positive, with an optimistic
positive outlook, but that you are, well, kind of treating the issue of darkness and lightness
in a far more subtle way. So I would be interested in the function of light and darkness and how you
can afford these two metaphors. Impossible to combine those questions. Let me just say about
the Gunter Gras question that, and I think maybe my father and I disagree on this, which is fine,
I hope. I'm okay with our disagreeing. For me, it's actually very, very important to be able
to differentiate between a criticism of Israel and an anti-Semitic position, that I think it's
possible to be completely rational and coherent and nuanced and sensitive and criticize the Israeli
government. I myself have some criticisms of the Israeli government. I do not consider myself an
anti-Semite, nor do I think that my criticisms of the Israeli government are a disguise for my
underlying anti-Semitism. And I think when people are feeling compelled to blur those
lines, they're missing an opportunity to see genuine critique as being complicated.
And so that's my feeling about it. I think my father is maybe more inclined to think that there
is this veiled anti-Semitism there. Is that speaking for you? Well, obviously I can't speak for
Gunter Gras's attitude and position on anti-Semitism or not. I think he made comments
that were obviously too overwhelming and too strong to some extent. And I have no
problem that he wants to criticize the government. And I think he explained he wanted to criticize
the prime minister and not the country, and that's okay too. But on the other hand, when you criticize
Israel and the Israeli government, you have to understand they are in a tremendously exposed
position and environment. And you have to be careful how you criticize them and what you
criticize them for, and what it is that you really feel is over the line. And I have no
problem in accepting the rights of everybody to criticize whoever they want to. But I do have a
strong feeling, and there were some reports subsequently, that a whole range of people
took Gunter Gras's comments now to it would be okay to criticize Israel, it could be anti-Semitic
again, and so forth. So a leading position like that has to be especially careful how he voices
and how he phrases his criticizing. But fundamentally, I have no problem in that being criticized
Israel being criticized, but to understand that how would you act in this kind of environment
where you are surrounded by people that want to wipe you off the map and have this decade old
feeling and don't really understand what it is they're talking about, and they don't even
understand what needs to be done, and have no willingness to really move towards Israel to some
extent. So as I said, I agree that the criticism is okay, but it has to be from a person like that,
he has to really think through what he wants to say, say it in a constructive fashion,
then it's much more powerful than it would come through in a way that is too negative.
I have a segue to get to the other questions. So I've always had great difficulty when
the criticism of Israel dares to, may I say, take the Holocaust's name in vain, to make
associations between the Israeli government's behavior and the Nazi government, for example.
That's just absurd, even though I think I understand where that's coming from, but I
object to it vociferously. And so in that same way, I think when I felt some people might be
considering that by my talking about a Central American massacre, I was daring to make a
connection between the Holocaust and another genocide in another time and place, I wasn't
intending to create analogies exactly. What I was talking about was human suffering,
the individual experience of suffering, the individual experience of trauma, and the struggle
we each one by one have to go through to make sense of what we've been through in our lives
and how we carry on with the rest of our lives. So trying to create collisions between
anti-Semitism and anti-Israel or the Holocaust and Rwanda, I actually don't find those useful,
but what I do find useful is a humanistic exploration of the individual experience of
war, of violence, of perpetrators, of victims, of trauma and recovery from trauma. And that's why
that story belongs here in this book for me. As for the imagery of the speed of light and whether
or not it's optimistic, for me, the dictionary definitions, and I hope this will maybe bring
the whole thing to a circle, the dictionary definitions that I encountered, the most
exciting one for me was when I read the literal definition of the speed of light
and found that for me, it was this beautiful metaphor for memory and that if you could travel
faster than the speed of light, you could be in two places at one time and that if memory serves us,
it allows us to be in the past and in the present at the same time. And so for me,
that's the goal of my work. It's the goal of these conversations. It's to allow us to really
hold both truths simultaneously, that the past really happened. The present is with us now.
We have to hold the past inside our experience of the present. And in an ideal world, we learn
from that past so that we transform our relationships to one another. And not to sound
too naive about the future, but we allow for the possibility of a future that really is a world of
peace where we really do see one another as human beings that we recognize when we look into one
another's eyes. And I'm so grateful to be able to look into all of your eyes this evening. I thank
all of you for doing this. I'm probably not supposed to be the closing voice. I think it's
perfect. Could there be more perfect last words, closing words? So let me thank all of you for
being here, for participating. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your questions. And yeah,
thank you. Have a nice rest of the evening. Thank you.