THE PAIN. Marguerite Duras

80 years after the end of the war – there remain things in the world that are unforgivable. Things that a country like Germany should never forgive itself for, never claim the mercy of forgiveness.
Because only then can there be no forgetting.

In the 1980s, it was still painful to travel as a German to France, Poland, or the Netherlands. There was always the shame of speaking and being recognized as German.

Today it is almost forgotten. And forgotten too are the many causes of today’s conflicts, which still have their origins in the German-made world catastrophe that supposedly ended more than 80 years ago. The war was over. But only for us.

The Pain by Marguerite Duras speaks with great clarity about the memory of what the Germans unleashed with Auschwitz—an atrocity that, as she formulates it, remains unmatched in any other time in human history, and lingers in every individual.

Duras describes waiting for her husband, Robert L., who as a member of the Résistance was deported to concentration camps and by chance rescued in a transport of corpses returning to Paris. At the Gare d’Orsay, she confronts the human remnant of 37 kilos. She can hardly bear to look at him, yet she nurses him back to life over many weeks.

When he has the strength to rise again, to listen to her once more, she tells him that she will leave him. “I knew that he knew, that I knew, that we both thought every hour: He did not die in the concentration camp.”