"Good! So what are you? The pigeon said, "I can see that you are about to make up something!" "
— Alice in Wonderland, Chapter 5
In 1944, Himmler's agents began coming to Madrid, Spain, to chart a route for the defeated Nazis to escape from Germany. Two years later, out of security concerns, the covert operation was transferred to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Juan Perón, who had only recently been elected president, allowed them to set up a base of operations in the presidential palace.
Argentina remained neutral during World War II, but the military largely supported Hitler and Mussolini. The wealthy upper class, though opposed to almost everything related to Perón, was themselves known for being anti-Semitic and silent about Perón's pro-Nazi behavior. At the same time, rumors spread among the Jewish community. In 1948, in order to suppress the protests that had already begun among Argentine Jews, Perón decided to send an ambassador to the newly established State of Israel, and it was my father, Pablo Mangueel.
Since my father was Jewish (the family had emigrated from Europe to South America and settled in a settlement opened by Baron Hirsch in the interior of Argentine), there was much opposition to his appointment, especially in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which had traditionally been the stronghold of Catholic nationalists. The Foreign Office also recommended a candidate with the Vatican's approval, but Perón, knowing how important the Jewish centripetal force was to him, was unmoved. Years later, despite the growing amount of evidence in the archives (and still is), Perón flatly denied that he had secretly aided the Nazi remnants that year, and must have used his nomination of my father as ambassador to prove his sympathy for the Jewish plight. But it is now known that among the most notorious Nazis who peron harbored peron were Adolf Eichmann and Joseph Mengele.
During Perón's reign in Argentina, Borges was one of only a few intellectuals who dared to speak out against the Nazis. As early as April 1934, in response to the criticism of the editors of the Argentine nationalist magazine "The Great Flame Furnace" (referring to Borges's "malicious concealment of the fact that he was Jewish"), Borges published a short essay "I, the Jew", admitting that he would occasionally entertain himself with the illusion of himself for the Jewish people, but alas, he could not find a Jewish ancestor in the family tree of the previous two hundred years. Jewish culture is the nourishment that nourishes his literary creation (the story of the Bible, the wisdom of the Talmud, the scholarly study of Gerson Sholem1, the nightmares of Gustav Melink2 and Kafka, the poems of Heine, the legend of the clay man Golian, the mysteries of Kabbalah), and although he never felt the need to defend his belief in the importance and value of Jewish culture, he mocked the anti-Semites for not digging up a trace of Jewish roots in every enemy.
"Statistically," Borges pondered, "there are very few Jews. What would you think of anyone in 4000 AD who thought that all over the world were descendants of the inhabitants of San Juan [one of Argentina's least populated provinces]? Our judges, how can we find all the Hebrews, is that we can't find the Phoenicians, the Numidians, the Scythians, the Babylonians, the Huns, the Vandals, the Ostrogoths, the Ethiopians, the Illyrians, the Pavlagonians, the Sarmatians, the Mythians, the Ottomans, the Berbers, the Britons, the Libyans, the Cyclops, or the Rapites. The night in the ancient cities of Alexandria, Babylon, Carthage, Memphis, etc., never succeeded in producing a grandfather; only the tribes of the Dead Sea with asphalt were given such generous gifts. ”
Borges also never denounced German culture. He had an article published on March 24, 1939 in The Family magazine (a popular family weekly magazine in Argentina at the time). This is a book review of a book written by a man named Lewis Golding; the title is not very auspicious, called "The Jewish Question."
Borges agreed with Goldin's attack on anti-Semitic ideas, but disagreed with his approach. Borges said that anti-Semitic thought "does everything in its power to deny the contribution of the Jewish nation to German culture (stupidity and ridiculousness); Goldin tries by every means to say that German culture is purely the contribution of the Jewish nation (stupid and ridiculous)." He accused racism of being stupid and ridiculous, but what he did was nothing more than use Jewish racism against Nazi racism with an almost imitative symmetry. His arguments jump from necessary defenses to unnecessary attacks. It is not necessary because Israel's "long" does not need Germany's "short" to support it. The reason why it is both unnecessary and unwise is because it is tantamount to accepting the proposition of the enemy side, that is, agreeing with the other side's assumption that Jews and non-Jews have ethnic differences at opposite poles."
A year later, shortly after the German invasion of Denmark, Borges transcribed a conversation he had with pro-Germans in Argentina. Borges argues that the other side of the conversation is fundamentally contradictory: the other side does not love Germany at all (he knows nothing about German culture), but simply hates Britain. And this man was also anti-Semitic, that is, he wanted to drive out all the Slavic-Germanic communities in Argentina, who were proud of their Germanic surnames (Rosenblatt, Glenberg, Nyrenstein) and spoke a Germanic dialect, Yiddish.
Mockingly, however, Borges argues that Jewish culture metaphysically carries a symbolic weight. He felt that Hitler's aim was to eliminate Jewish culture, because (Borges believed) Jewish culture was indispensable to human culture. If so, then Hitler's desire to exterminate the Jews is but part of the universe's arrangement in the underworld to prove the eternal existence of the Jewish nation. "Nazism suffers from a defect from reality..." Borges wrote in his Commentary on August 23, 1944 (which was liberation day in Paris), "it is uninhabitable; man can only die for it, lie for it, fight for it, shed blood for it, and no one can desire victory in the loneliness of his heart." I ventured to guess: Hitler wanted to be defeated. ”
Borges and the white cat bepppo
Two years later, Borges arranged for a German officer to argue for himself and what he had done in the short story "The Requiem for Germany" (arguably the precursor to Jonathan Little's "The Goddess of Vengeance"): "The world tends to die because of Judaism, because of the problems of Judaism, the faith in Jesus; we teach the world with violence and faith in the sword, and the sword is now killing us; we are like the wizard who built a labyrinth and ended up trapping himself inside; like David, He tried a man whose name was hidden, sentenced him to death, and then heard the revelation: 'You are the one.' At this point, the Nazi officer uttered a powerful sentence, cursing himself: "If victory, injustice, and happiness are not for Germany, let other countries enjoy it." Let heaven exist underneath, even if our place is hell. ”
"Like the Druze, the moon, death, the next week, the distant past can be glorified with ignorance." Borges wrote this in I, the Jew. In such a situation, good and evil are all swept aside by equal indifference, then the history of the past can be rewritten, and false memories can be true. He later wrote a short story, "The Utopia of a Weary Man", which is portrayed in this way. In this novel, Borges depicts a nightmare world in which time falls into the future. Borges meets helpful and kind people who lead him to this brave new world. En route Borges to see a domed tower. "That's a crematorium," the guide explained, "there's a death chamber inside." It is said that the inventor was a philanthropist, probably named Adolf Hitler. ”
As a dignified, humble, intellectually honest man, Borges did not want to be remembered; he only wished that a few of his works would be passed down, indifferent to his reputation. He longed for the individual to be forgotten (Borges wrote in a poem" "Ask it to be forever and not to have been"), afraid that the memory of history would change, or that the world would often be unable to resist the lowest and most despicable impulses to falsify historical facts. That's why Borges despises politics (which he says is "the dirtiest activity of mankind") and believes in fictional truths and our ability to tell true stories.
This article is excerpted from The Ideal Reader
The Ideal Reader
Manguel by Song Weihang, translated
Xinmin said| Guangxi Normal University Press
A Secret History of the Argentine Mind: Manguel's most autobiographical collection, hailed by Georges Steiner as "Don Juan of the Library", recalls Borges' love affair and the impact of Che Guevara's death, criticizing Llosa for complicity with those in power.