An Antidote to Fanaticism
Personal good and evil are not the assets of any religion . They are not necessarily religious terms . The choice whether to inflict pain or not to inflict it , to look it in the face or to turn a blind eye to it , to get personally involved in healing pain , like a devoted country doctor , or to make do with organising angry demonstrations and signing wholesale petitions - this spectrum of choice confronts each one of us several times a day .
As a very nationalistic , even chauvinistic , little boy in Jerusalem of the 1940s , I vowed never to set foot on German soil , never even to buy any German product . The only thing I could not boycott were German books . If you boycott the books , I told myself , you will become a little bit like " them ". At first I limited myself to reading the pre-war German literature and the anti- Nazi writers . But later , in the 1960s , I began to read , in Hebrew translations , the works of the post-war generation of German writers and poets . In particular , the works of the Group 47 writers led by Hans Werner Richter . They made me imagine myself in their place . I ' ll put it more sharply : they seduced me to imagine myself in their stead , back in the dark years , and just before the dark years , and just after .
Reading these authors , and others , I could no longer go on simply hating everything German , past , present and future .
I believe that imagining the other is a powerful antidote to fanaticism and hatred . I believe that books that make us imagine the other , may turn us more immune to the ploys of the devil , including the inner devil .
Imagining the other is not only an aesthetic tool . It is , in my view , also a major moral imperative . And finally , imagining the other - if you promise not to quote this little professional secret - imagining the other is also a deep and very subtle human pleasure . — Amos Oz , Israeli novelist , upon receiving the Goethe Price , Frankfurt , Germany , 2005 .
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