Mollerade

This is cutout from page 7 of a speach given by David Grossman for the International Literature Festival Berlin, available in full here.

Individual Language and Mass Language
(international literature festival berlin, September 4, 2007)

Perhaps it is only in this global reality, where so much of our life is lived in a massdimension, that we can be so indifferent to mass destruction. For it is the very same indifference that the vast majority of the world displays time after time, whether during the Armenian Holocaust or the Jewish Holocaust, in Rwanda or in Bosnia, in the Congo, in Darfur, and in many other places. And perhaps, then, this is the great question that people living in this age must relentlessly ask themselves: In what state, at which moment, do I become part of the faceless crowd, “the masses”? There are a number of ways to describe the process whereby the individual is swallowed up in the crowd, or agrees to hand over parts of himself to mass-control. Since we, here, are people of literature and language, I will choose the one closest to our interests and to our way of life: I become part of the “masses” when I give up the right to think and formulate my ow  words, in my own language, instead accepting automatically and uncritically the formulations
and language that others dictate.
I become “the masses” when I stop formulating my own choices and the moral compromises I make. When I stop formulating them over and over again, with fresh new words each time, words that have not yet eroded in me, not yet congealed in me, which I cannot ignore or defend myself against, and which force me to face the decisions I have made, and to pay the price for them.
The masses, as we know, cannot exist without mass-language—a language that will consolidate the multitude and spur it on to act in a certain way, formulating justifications for its acts and simplifying the moral and emotional contradictions it may encounter. In other words, the language of the masses is a language intended to liberate the individual from responsibility for his actions, to temporarily sever his private, individual judgment from his sound logic and natural sense of justice.