Via the NYT I came across this:
Jürgen Moltmann, Theologian Who Confronted Auschwitz, Is Dead at 98
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/0
In which I discovered these:
Well, I recently finished my readings for the Brown German Studies Course: Postcatastrophic Narratives: Memory and Postmemory in German Literature after 1945, and I have some questions.
How does god suffer or mourn without a body? Moreover, if god could mourn and suffer, isn't this all he would do? Does god read the papers? It's a shit show out there of epic (dare I say biblical) proportions. If god had a body with a brain and a limbic system to process emotions, he wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Moltmann's god would be depressed and powerless.
Moltmann, like others from WWII, is trying to process and reconcile god with the world. Different from Adorno ("Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.") who jettisons god, and different from Sebald who can't trust god or memory, tries to anthropomorphize god for a reconciliation but doesn't follow the logic through.
Putting god in the play makes him a schlub like the rest of us. Putting god in Germany makes him accountable. Giving god a body renders him subject to depression at best and entropy at worst.
God can't be reconciled. At all. Not with WWII and The Holocaust, not with natural selection, not with entropy.
