Primo Levi

"Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are … the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions."

Levi is one of the most respected and eminent of all survivors and chroniclers of the Holocaust. His comment suggests that some of the most devastating evil is enacted, not by great monsters, but by people who lack the intellectual and moral curiosity to ask what is going on, to think clearly about what they are asked to do and why. The Holocaust required hundreds of thousands of functionaries to implement: train drivers, guards, accountants, engineers, mechanics, chemists, carpenters, clerks -- even doctors. It was the collective willingness of these nameless functionaries that made possible the elimination of European Jews. Everyone rationalized that they were doing their job, carrying out what they were "supposed to do." No single person made possible the great horror, but a hive of individuals, each doing their own tiny tasks that, gathered together, led to an unprecedented atrocity that forever changed humans' conception of the evil that humans can effect on each other. This example of unquestioning obedience, of reflexive compliance, of a monumental failure to pay attention to the world, should be the most powerful argument of all in favor of a shared understanding of humane literacy. Critical and independent thinking, combined with a cultivation of the moral imagination, can create a people immune from the machinations of monsters who require the complacency of the many to implement their catastrophes.

Hans Erich Nossack

Hans Erich Nossack was a major German writer of the 20th century. Born in 1901, Nossack survived the wars and is best known for three major works, all available in English translation. The End describes the Allied firebombing of Hamburg and its aftermath. An Offering for the Dead is set in a post-apocalyptic world in which the protagonist must dream a world back to life. And Wait for November concerns lovers who struggle to escape to a freedom from societal restraints even as their pasts prove difficult to leave behind. It has been compared with Madame Bovary as an exemplary literary work that anatomizes love -- its passions and complexities -- from the perspective of a woman seeking to break free.

An Offering for the Dead opens on a scene of devastation and confusion. "It was raining again. Or still. I had no power over it. So I stood up and went back. I told the people: "I will find a road." Not that they asked me to do so. They were lying around like lumps of clay; a few rolled over, sighing. I only said it because at that moment it struck me as the the right thing for them. But it was a lie; for I knew that the road could not possibly be where I was heading. And that was why I hesitated after a few steps; perhaps I would have done better to add: 'If I do not come back, start off as fast as possible in the opposite direction.' I could also have left them something of mine, to reveal that I could no longer be counted on. But I had already vanished behind the curtain of rain. Besides, my words would have made no sense. The people had no inkling whatsoever that I was returning. They had lost all sense of direction."