010089 BA Auschwitz - a commanding word. Elie Wiesel - Johann Baptist Metz - Friedrich Wilhelm Marquardt (2013W)

Emil L. Fackenheim wrote in his book "To Mend the World" that it "is unthinkable that the gulf between Jews and Gentiles, created and legislated since 1933, should be unbridgeable so that the few but heroic, saintly attempts to bridge it from the Gentile side ... should come to naught. It is this unthinkability that caused my own mind, on first confronting it, the perception of a '614th commandment,' or a 'commanding voice of Auschwitz,' forbidding the post-Holocaust Jew to give Hitler post-humous victory."

The seminar will deal with three remarkable bridgebuilders. Each of them was born in 1928, 85 years ago, and each of them stood at a different side of the gulf.

Elie Wiesel (born 28th of Sept., 1928) was deported to Auschwitz and survived. Ever since the late 1950s he was in quest of what had happened to his people and why it had happened. His remembrance of the Shoa made him be an almost prophetic admonisher to fight every kind of Anti-Semitism and hatred between men in order to prevent future genocides and mass murder.

Johann Baptist Metz (born 5th of Aug., 1928), a Catholic theologian, realized that Auschwitz was not just a political catastrophe, but a Christian disaster. His conclusion was and is that Christian theology must always be developed face to face with Auschwitz. This is the very heart of Metz' Political Theology.

Friedrich Wilhelm Marquardt (2nd of Dec., 1928-25th of May, 2002) belonged to the Evangelic Church, dealt with Biblical and Rabbinic Judaism, and was the author of a dogmatic theology facing the situation after Auschwitz as a situation, "in which we dare to speak of God only with the reservation of God; the presupposition of everything in connection with God ... must be: 'as God wills and He lives.'"