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Mr. President, Mr. Minister, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen: It is indeed my honor to address you today on the day of the opening of a new session of the General Assembly. It is appropriate, in this place where you do such important and tireless work to resolve many of the conflicts that rage around our world, for us to come before God and ask for God's wisdom and God's guidance. It is also appropriate, I think, for the theme of my talk to be reconciliation. I thank you for your attention as I reflect on this theme.

Allow me to start by drawing your attention to the character of the world in which we live. I will not do so by quoting statistics about many dangers and sufferings in our world, statistics that you know better than I do; instead I will offer a meditative text written by a young Jewish poet immediately after World War II. It is a poem with unpredictable rhythms, a poem with grim metaphors, a poem with a startling combination of tenderness and brutality. Here is the first stanza.

Black milk of daybreak.
We drink it at evening.
We drink it at midday and morning.
We drink it at night.
We drink and we drink.
We shovel a grave in the air.
There you won't lie all too cramped.
A man lives in the house.
He plays with his vipers.
He writes.
He writes when it grows dark to Germany,
Of your golden-haired Margarita.
He writes it and steps out of doors.
And the stars are all sparkling.
He whistles his hounds to come close.
He whistles his Jews into rows,
Has them shovel a grave in the ground.
He commands us "play up for the dance."

This poem must be one of the most remarkable literary creations about the most infamous event of the twentieth century. The event is the Holocaust; the poem is Paul Celan's Death Fugue. Behind the outlandish images of digging graves "in the air" and "in the ground" and about "playing up for the dance" lies a brutal reality. It was common practice in Nazi concentration camps to order one group of prisoners to play or sing nostalgic tunes while others dug graves or were executed. Young German men who were cultivated enough to occupy themselves with writing, and who were tender enough to daydream about their girlfriends' golden hair, were masters of death.

Now the Holocaust is in many ways unique, perhaps not so much in its scale and brutality as in its technological sophistication and the single-mindedness with which murderous intentions were directed against particular people. But the reason that I read this poem to you is because in so many places in the world today, similar things are happening. In many respects, the Holocaust is not an anomaly in the world in which we live. Death is not just a blue-eyed master from Germany.

Rivers of blood have flowed and mountains of corpses have grown most recently in my own country, Croatia, as also in Macedonia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and other places — you name them, you know them all better than I do. They all bear horrifying testimony to the fact that the world in which we live is also a world in which the most brutal practices of exclusion are the order of the day. And I have not even mentioned living rooms. You may know that, statistically, most of the violence in this world does not happen on battlefields but in homes, between estranged spouses, parents and children, and siblings.

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September (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45