Finding a Super-Massive Black Hole in German Thought

Today, once more, I went to a talk entitled »A New View on Black Holes« that was given by Douglas Richstone, who discovered the hitherto largest supermassive Black hole in 2011 (~10 million times the mass of our sun). I am unsure why I have always been so fascinated with black holes and cosmology in general, maybe it is the cosmological spirit of a deep-seated longing for unity that flows through me just like through any particle of matter or energy—in German we have a great word that I like to use in this context, Beseelung (ensoulment). Besides this ›zen‹ take on my fascination, there is of course another, much ›darker‹ resonance I can detect with that topic in my life. Currently, I am teaching the class »20th-century Modern German and European Thought« that merges fields like German studies, philosophy, and history together (we read people like Nietzsche, Arendt, Heidegger, Benjamin, Schmitt, Sontag, and more), and given the gravity of the histories coming together, often feels like entering a black hole. I once noted (in a still unpublished but, hopefully, soon upcoming paper) that it was the holocaust survivor Primo Levi, who compared the unescapable ›death grip‹ of extermination camps with a black hole: »As Levi wrote in The Black Hole of Auschwitz (2005), ›Treblinka or Chelmno … did not produce work, were not concentration camps, but ›black holes‹ destined for men, women and children guilty of being Jews, where people arrived by train only to go straight into the gas chambers, from which no one ever came out alive.‹ (92). While a black hole might possibly transport you to a new world—at least there is room for speculation—it was clear where your journey went.« Looking at this particular era of history—necessarily—has to feel like entering black hole, but we need to remain looking for the light at the end of the tunnel, in whatever way we can. I wish I could end this with a more meaningful phrase, but I cannot find a way out at the moment, but maybe one day.