Private parts: writers and the battle for our inner lives

Josh Cohen in New Statesman:

At the end of last year, an international group of writers drafted a petition decrying the escalation of state surveillance and calling for a digital bill of rights to protect the privacy of all global citizens. Scattered among the numerous expressions of solidarity in the online comment boxes were a good few barbs aimed at the presumption of a self-appointed elite of “arch-pseuds” that their writerly status conferred on them some special authority to speak on this question. Why, after all, should a petition of writers carry any more weight in the debate on privacy than one of welders or florists? A few weeks later, I had an encounter with an author that brought to life the specific and urgent link between literature and privacy. The writer was Otto Dov Kulka, the winner of this year’s Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize, for which I was on the judging panel. A distinguished Czech-born Israeli historian of the Nazi genocide, Kulka received the prize for Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death (2013), a personal and philosophical meditation on his experience as a child survivor of Auschwitz.

Receiving the prize, Kulka spoke of having dedicated his life after Auschwitz to documenting Nazism’s crimes in the rigorously disinterested language of the historian. But alongside this contribution to the public record, he had silently amassed a personal archive of memories, dreams and images of his time as an inmate of the so-called family camp at Auschwitz, which he called his “private mythology”. No one could fail to be moved by the undisguised delight and incredulity with which this slight yet robust old man received the award. The source of that incredulity was not false modesty but the genuine conviction he’d had when writing the book that the experience to which he was giving voice was too private to be shared – echoing the terrible recurring dream related by Primo Levi, of telling his experiences of Auschwitz to a group of oblivious listeners. Landscapes is the fruit not of any long-held literary ambition on Kulka’s part but of his search for a language that would do justice to the terrible singularity of his story. The form of the book wasn’t so much chosen as imposed on him by the privacy of the experience he sought to convey.

More here.