“One of the concluding speeches has already been given. Amid an embarrassed silence in the courtroom, Göring, the first to speak, has cast down a bit of nasty, bumptious cant. He was plainly nervous, annoyed and muddled. Even he, who, with his occasional vestiges of personality and authority, had maintained something like the dignity of a gang boss and something like gallows humor, now seems pathetically second-rate and humanly shabby. His words are cheap rhetoric. Whatever the court decides, he sullenly barks, he leaves the actual and final judgment to history: the future youth of Germany will pass the just verdict on him and his comrades. Period. He sits down again, fat, pale, disreputable.

•

“If everything else had not been in this style, then his words would sound horrifying. The future youth of Germany is growing up out there, in the rubble fields beyond the walls of this courthouse, guarded like a fortress, beyond its barriers, beyond the heated rooms, all the food in the cafeteria, the fragrant cigarettes and manicured fingernails of the secretaries and all the grandiose fictions and abstract rules of the court proceedings. There, beyond this Middle Kingdom here, an entirely different reality prevails. The youth growing up out there was conceived in Quonset huts by more or less maimed fathers and dropsical mothers; no sooner could this youth crawl than it learned how to pilfer potatoes and risk its life gleaning coal chips on railroad embankments and filching cigarette butts from the fingers of Allied soldiers. In all likelihood, this new generation will create its myths independently of moralistic reflections on history. Yet here, in here, those words sound like dreadful cant. Embarrassing cant: they remind everyone that here, everything is cant and must remain cant. That the more and more threadbare, more and more brittle as-if—which was meant to apply the legal conception of the civil code in punishing the deliberate and generally perpetrated annihilation of entire human races—cannot end in anything other than cant.

•

“The dreadful thing, the ridiculous thing, the poignant thing about the Nuremberg Trial is that it is built upon cant and thus has nothing else to put forward but simply cant. It is the desperate attempt at inflating the cant on which our civilization rests, the noble, sad, quixotic tilting of Western fictions at the windmills of the reality of human nature. Of course, the magic of these fictions is still powerful enough to keep the trial going. Their magic has sufficed not only to make the prosecutors act shocked, indignant, and full of holy zeal, and the judges dignified and aware of their high office (albeit with an occasional skeptical shake of their heads), but (more astonishingly) to make the accused perform their parts as lawful defendants. Yet that is precisely what makes the events here so spectral. It turns them into a ghostly spectacle. Nothing has any reality.