In this blog post, I aim to examine the origins of evil and the contradictions of punishment under positive law through the story of Blangé in Alexander Kluge’s ‘Resumes’.

The Problem of Evil and Justice

Alexander Kluge’s ‘Resumes’ primarily deals with the lives of numerous individuals before and after World War II. The work encompasses extremely weighty themes such as war, murder, exile, experiments in concentration camps, and positive law and punishment. Given the sheer diversity and complexity of the stories, it is difficult to group them under a single theme; however, the content can be categorized through several recurring and varying motifs. Here, I will examine them broadly under three categories: the problem of evil and justice, the problem of emotion and love in modern society, and narrative functions that serve as memorials and sources of hope. Of course, these perspectives are interrelated, just like the stories within the work.
Lieutenant Boulanger is a doctor dispatched to collect the skulls of “Jewish Communist political commissars” for racial research conducted at the University of Strasbourg during the war. The assistant at this racial research institute may seem demonic at first glance, but he is merely an ordinary human being. While his opportunistic yet dogmatic personality—driven by a desire for success—may appear to be a flaw, it cannot be used alone to label him as “evil.” So where, exactly, do such colossal crimes originate?
The “banality of evil” that Hannah Arendt discussed in ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ is directly linked to this question. Eichmann was one of the officials responsible for ordering the deportation of millions of Jews to the gas chambers, yet during his postwar trial, he claimed that he had merely followed orders. The portrayal of Blangé by Kluge can be read as a mirror image of Eichmann. If Eichmann was the one who issued orders on paper, Blangé was the one who carried out those orders directly on the ground.
Arendt points out that medical research and other related topics were excluded from discussion during Eichmann’s trial. This excluded aspect may be precisely the issue at the heart of Blangé’s story. Arendt identified Eichmann’s guilt in his inability to think from the perspective of the Other, and the same applies to Blanchot. He resolved that, “though doubts continued to mount,” he would “maintain thoughts and good intentions only to the extent that they did not hinder the performance of his duties.”
But is there no other source of evil besides the individual’s ordinariness and numbness—which sound like the “hamartia” of ancient Greek tragedy—and his petty desires and fears? Kluge’s narratives always require a more careful reading. First, in this account, we must pay attention to the strange combination of concepts in the phrase “Jewish Communist political commissar.” The very concept—which bundles together the cultural-religious category of “Jewish,” the political belief of “Communism,” the biological practice of “skull research,” and the military classification of “political commissar”—is logically nonsensical.
Nevertheless, all these definitions of “evil” converge to create a single “absolute evil.” However, the real problem is that these very definitions themselves gave rise to Boulanger’s evil deeds. Like a misbuttoned shirt, these concepts do not fit together, yet evil arises when they are combined from the perspective of the one who defines them. Kluge implies that the failure to rigorously distinguish what should be distinguished is, in fact, the starting point of all evil. The truth hidden in the cracks between these concepts can only be sensed indirectly by the protagonist, like “the wind seeping through a crack.”
Kluge takes the story of Blangé’s crimes a step further. If the label “Jewish Communist political commissar” was originally a kind of fixed notion of evil applied to an individual, then, ironically, the belated calls for Blangé’s condemnation only make the situation even more bizarre. It was not until the 1960s—decades after the war ended—that demands for social punishment caught up with Blanchard once again.
Blanchard, who carried out these horrific tasks, became a businessman after the war, was imprisoned, and then returned to work as a factory laborer. Now a Marxist, he had become a powerless, helpless man who “must do nothing.” The “human connection” that emerges during an interview with a reporter from a left-wing daily reveals the irony between an ordinary man and the horror of the crime he committed, while also highlighting the vast chasm between evil as defined by the law and an individual who is truly alienated.

Crime and Punishment, the Gap Between the Individual and the System

It is precisely at this point that the issue of positive law and the definition of evil arises. When the reporter asks Blanger why he doesn’t go to East Germany, Blanger replies that it is because the statute of limitations has not expired there. Complex questions regarding crime, evil, and the corresponding punishments and jurisdictions follow. Is it right that heinous crimes are punished in some places but not in others?
Does a villain cease to be a villain once he crosses a border? If so, should the “embodiments of evil” be executed on the spot, wherever and whenever they are found, and eradicated from the face of the earth? If they disappear, does evil disappear with them? Eichmann was secretly arrested by the Mossad in Argentina in 1960, extradited to Israel, tried in 1961, and executed in 1962. Arendt raised objections on several fronts to Israel’s official stance regarding Eichmann’s arrest, trial, and punishment.
In this story about Boulanger, the reporter from ‘L’Humanité’ states, “If all human beings are equal, then exchanging the lives of many for the life of one is an unfair exchange.” Arendt pointed out that retributive logic offers no adequate way to address such a massive crime, and she observed that, as a result, Eichmann displayed an absurd sense of pathos, viewing himself as a scapegoat for humanity. The public trial is linked to the theatrical nature of the public sphere—as a punishment of evil rather than the punishment of the individual per se.
That said, the logic of “hate the sin, not the sinner” cannot be fully realized in reality. This is because we cannot overlook questions regarding individual responsibility and the possibility of action. Therefore, Blangier’s story does not merely dwell on postwar historical issues but raises more general and enduring questions about massive crimes, evil, and punishment.
Kluge uses the short story format to pose questions about issues that do not lend themselves easily to such conclusions. The author merely serves to prompt the reader to organize connections in their own mind, without attempting to deliver a definitive judgment. The subsequent story, “The Disappearance of a Certain Attitude—Prosecutor Shellyha,” demands the reader’s more active engagement in the debate over sin, evil, and punishment.
Shellyha is a prosecutor dispatched from the central government to solve a murder case in a provincial region. No one has pressed charges against Z, the lord of Elving Province, who is the prime suspect, and local authorities even appear to be trying to shield him. While tenaciously investigating this case, Shellyha eventually ends up as a prisoner of the Russian army in a remote region. Although he passes by countless scenes of murder, he pursues a single murderer to the very end—an attitude that may seem bizarre rather than just.
The narrator states, “A criminal justice professional must devote themselves even more rigorously to their duties precisely when they feel their institution has failed, and must always do their utmost to ensure the strongest possible enforcement of criminal law.” However, is the “restoration of a damaged law” here truly for the sake of justice, or is it for the sake of the law’s own self-serving purpose? If it is for justice, why does the narrator remain silent about the justice of the war unfolding right beside him?
The reason reading this story feels like sinking deeper into a labyrinth until the very end is, on the one hand, due to the chase after the culprit, but it is also because the nature of this murder case—which proceeds solely through paperwork without first identifying the victim—is suspicious.
The story does not mention the victims’ identities even once. It is entirely focused on the pursuit of the perpetrator.
It is said that even today, the exact number of people who died in concentration camps, including Auschwitz, remains unknown—we can only make rough estimates. Perhaps the lawyers who pursued such crimes after World War II found themselves in a situation similar to that of Schellich, chasing a murderer without a body, relying solely on reports. However, they, too, were busy pursuing the perpetrators rather than focusing on the victims.
Yet what the reader must reexamine from the very beginning is just how credible the narrator of this story—and Shellyha’s report—actually is. Who, exactly, is this narrator who speaks of such legal principles?
Why on earth did Shellyha risk his life to go to that place where enemy forces were advancing? Who exactly did Z kill? Could it be that Shellyha went there to issue an order to “empty the prison and summarily execute traitors and escapees”? Was Z perhaps someone who posed a high risk of exposing these massacres?
The story only grows more confusing, and the gaps feel increasingly glaring to the reader.
The debate that takes place at the Rotary Club at the end can only be described as ironic in many ways. They discuss justice, but in reality, no one can precisely define what justice or evil is, and the discussion ultimately fizzles out, ending with “warm applause.”
This likely serves as a direct reflection of the situation in Germany at the time, which was wavering over the issue of its past in the aftermath of World War II. Furthermore, the fact that this debate and lecture take place midway through the period when the Eichmann trial was underway is highly significant.
On the other hand, this debate can be viewed as a new literary experiment in that it adopts the format of meeting minutes to concisely present various perspectives on justice. Ultimately, it is the reader who must weigh the various perspectives and pass judgment.
The stories of the various judges appearing in ‘Korti’ once again address the problems of positive law and the legal system. Korti is portrayed as the epitome of a philistine.
The atmosphere he exudes clearly conveys the sense that the justice administered by the judiciary does not encompass all forms of justice. That said, he does not mishandle any cases in terms of positive law. On the contrary, “Corti is quicker, stronger, and more cautious than any other judge,” and “more democratic and more modern than the majority of his colleagues.”
He is merely seeking, as an advocate for the judiciary, to solidify the system and, along with it, to more firmly secure his own survival.
The issue of judges who collaborated with the Nazis, addressed in this story, casts even greater doubt on the validity of positive law. Judges who had previously handed down death sentences in accordance with the laws of the time now found themselves in a predicament once the war ended and the times changed.
The section of this story that examines the history of the judiciary further highlights the flaws in positive law and the legal system.

“The judiciary placed the ideal of justice within the walls of the judiciary and protected it from an unjust world, yet justice did not exist within those walls. Cut off from the very domains that should have supplied it with resources because of the ideal of justice, the judiciary became perverted. Just as the judiciary defended itself against many other domains, it also defended itself against justice itself. Who loves the judiciary? Everyone who should fear change loves the judiciary.”

Kluge, himself a lawyer and holder of a doctorate in law, offers a very sharp critique of the judiciary. Justice was originally the principle of restoring balance—the principle of rectifying what is wrong and returning things to their original state. However, when the judiciary monopolizes this principle, such balance can no longer be achieved; only a massive machine continues to turn.
But did he himself consider this strong criticism to be excessive? Kluge adds a slightly different perspective at the end. This is evidenced by the bailiffs’ testimony that the situation has changed since World War II and that the judiciary no longer enjoys its former status.
However, this testimony also sounds somewhat absurd, precisely because Corti is still at the height of his power.

“Around 1800, a single newspaper article would have been enough to remove someone like Corti. Around 1900, a reform movement would have been inevitable to achieve that. In 1962, even a riot might not be enough to remove Corti. And who on earth would start a riot over Corti? Thus, Corti’s demise is a very distant prospect. Yes, for the time being, Corti’s demise is becoming an increasingly distant prospect.”

The phrase “for the time being” in the last sentence is a temporary reservation regarding Corti’s demise. Herein lies Kluge’s true irony and hidden intent.
Incidentally, it seems necessary to mention the story of Corti that reappears in “The Fifth Book: New Resumes,” newly published in 2012. The Corti who appears in these “New Resumes” is now 91 years old, 50 years later.
He left the legal profession long ago, and “he no longer has the energy to defend himself.” This is because he no longer considers himself important enough to be attacked. “Defending his ‘system’ now is less about confronting an enemy than about warding off the passing of time.”
Since his retirement, he has found it difficult to maintain his rhythm of life, and all his close relatives have already passed away. “Although it’s unlikely, even if he were to come under attack again, he probably wouldn’t be able to fend it off anymore. And to think that the entire meaning of his life lay in self-defense!” Kluge’s cynicism toward this figure seems to remain unchanged even 50 years later.

What are love and emotion in modern society?

The judicial defense system examined above is closely related to the overall character of modern society—one that is managed and controlled—against which Adorno and Horkheimer issued a strong warning in ‘The Dialectic of Enlightenment’.
Through ‘The Dialectic of Enlightenment’, Adorno and Horkheimer attempted to re-enlighten an enlightenment that had become rigid and an end in itself; Kluge takes up this attempt and further argues that a dialectic of emotion is also necessary.
The goal is to dialectically contrast various emotions, using this dialectic to enlighten emotions while simultaneously cultivating a new capacity for discernment.
For Kluge, reason appears to be merely one of humanity’s capacities for discernment—a component of highly developed emotion. He believes that our errors and tragic events arise precisely from the fact that our emotions remain as they are, and that we fail to learn anew from them, instead repeating the same patterns.
In “Manfred Schmidt’s” account, building on this deeper understanding, the focus is not merely on how reason has become self-serving in modern society, but also on the problem of emotions—which, like reason, are fixed and managed.
In modern society, the issue of emotions has become a crucial tool for mobilizing the consuming masses. In other words, in the “managed world,” the so-called “culture industry” serves as a vital means of consolidating the system.
Kluge turns his gaze here to a slightly more general, so-called “popular” festival setting. In the early part of this story, through interviews with various civil servants and police officers, as well as descriptions of the festival grounds, it shows how the festival as an event attempts to efficiently manipulate people’s easily aroused emotions.
Even people’s excitement has been institutionalized, and companies precisely calculate these aroused emotions to use them to their advantage. Furthermore, any deviant behavior that strays from this is strongly controlled by the police and judicial authorities, which have joined forces with the companies.
Here, too, the reader gains new insights through interviews with various characters.
The accidents caused by crowds—which we often see in the news in modern society—are, in fact, merely a brief glimpse, like the tip of an iceberg, of the dangers inherent in this system of emotional management.
This story is also closely related to the account of the soccer stadium accident that appears at the end of ‘Those Who Always Hold onto Hope Die Singing’.

“Perhaps if something were to happen, people would cling to one another, and then (……) they would fall onto the marble floor of the lower staircase and surely die. Perhaps if that had happened, we could have confirmed the mistakes made by the festival organizing committee.”

Manfred Schmidt and the Landscape of Love

Although the story is titled “Manfred Schmidt,” the character himself doesn’t appear until much later in the narrative. This arrangement suggests that his love story is embedded within the context of a society tilted toward emotional excess. His romances always begin quickly and end just as quickly. In a society where everything must be distributed and exchanged safely and swiftly, a kind of state of intoxication must be created to sustain it, and love, too, comes to resemble these traits.
The premise that Manfred plays the role of the foolish prince at a boisterous festival is symbolic. This extremely superficial character is highly adaptable in such a society. He dresses himself up like a festival grounds, but others who encounter him directly ultimately experience extreme cold. His very existence evokes the strange coexistence between the sharp-eyed security guards monitoring the festival grounds and the intoxicated crowd.
The death of the female bartender at the festival overlaps with the final scene of the guitarist—drinking alone in a bar after having an abortion and breaking up with Manfred. The abortion scene, as a metaphor for failed love, raises the question of whether this form of love is not, in fact, commonplace in a “managed” modern society where boisterousness and human alienation coexist. The story that follows immediately afterward, “An Experiment in Love,” is significant in this context. The way it uses the production of a child as a metaphor for love and then subverts it into a negative meaning is also noteworthy.

An Experiment in Love: The Narrative and Ethics of Human Experimentation

“An Experiment in Love” is one of Kluge’s most controversial works. The gist of the story is that in 1943, at a concentration camp, a plan was devised to render prisoners mass-sterile using X-rays; to verify its effectiveness, a male and female prisoner who were lovers were placed in the same room in an attempt to induce sexual contact, but the attempt failed.
This incident is said to be based on castration experiments that actually took place in concentration camps during World War II. One essay analyzing this story compares these two prisoners to those who had fallen into a state of extreme helplessness in the concentration camp—the so-called “Muselmänner.” The Muselmänner were referred to by their fellow inmates as “walking corpses” or “human mummies” and are described as being virtually indistinguishable from the dead.
The inhumanity and cruelty of these medical experiments cannot be emphasized enough. However, on the other hand, this story exists more as a fictional construct than as a fact that precisely matches historical records. Even if it were a real event, what has already happened cannot be changed in any way. In this context, the ethics of representation become an issue.
In ‘On the Suffering of Others’, Susan Sontag questions the ethics of photographing and viewing images of war victims. She argues that we cannot fully comprehend the victims’ suffering and that careful self-reflection is necessary to prevent such victims from being reduced to mere spectacles. In this regard, Kluge appears to be attempting to uphold his own ethical standards through his “documentary” narrative.
The brutal narrative compels the reader to follow the camp supervisor’s observational gaze while simultaneously evoking feelings of fear, anger, and revulsion toward him. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the reader becomes complicit in the observer’s perspective as he conducts this experiment, and as a result, is directly confronted with the moral questions posed by this story.

The Feasibility of Love: The Story as a Thought Experiment

On one hand, this experimental story can be viewed (albeit somewhat cynically) as a philosophical thought experiment asking what love is. The cold, hard question posed at the end of the story—“Does this ending mean that once unhappiness exceeds a certain level, love can no longer be realized?”—is also a deeply violent one. This is because it forcibly links “love”—and mechanical “execution”—which are typically classified as distinct concepts.
The moment we answer this question in the affirmative, we risk falling into the trap of “Nazi biological experimentation logic,” which posits that even love is manipulable. Nevertheless, this sentence possesses a power akin to a fragment of truth. Faced with it, we experience a numbing “ambivalence” that leaves us unable to pass judgment. When reading this story, we are confronted with a black wall: the fact that we cannot know the characters’ inner worlds except through the observer’s violent gaze.
However, our gaze as we peer into that black mirror is reflected back to us with a certain belief. The reader poses the question, asking themselves, “Where is love?” This question itself remains like an unwavering conviction, creating the reader’s inner drive.

Love as Communication and Its Limits

Social philosopher Luhmann defined love not as an emotion but as communication. However, this definition reveals its limitations in this story. For these prisoners, who “do not engage in any sort of conversation” and “sit in separate corners,” even acts of love or communication are excluded. In such a case, is there truly anything left that can be called communication?
Perhaps the love the reader hopes exists between the two lovers resembles our attempt to see historical and concrete facts within fiction. Given that the story itself would become dead language and cease to function without the reader’s belief and persistence, the interpretation that whether or not love exists among these “experimental subjects” depends on the reader’s belief is, at first glance, persuasive. Of course, this interpretation also carries its own risks.
From this perspective, the story can also be read as an allegory of the rejection of reading that seeks love stories. The conventional discourse on love in the “managed world” functions as a means of mass-castrating the desire for love in the “cheapest way possible.” Such love must be quickly consumed and exhausted, and Manfred Schmidt’s story has already revealed this social foreboding.
In a world where love—implicitly linked to productivity in both the media and reality—is forced upon us, how can we find “true love”? This story takes to the extreme the question of whether love in such a society can perhaps exist only as “negativity.” However, Kluge’s works are not always portrayed solely in a negative light. Ironically, a positive portrayal of emotions—including love—is found in the short story “The Deconstruction of Crime Through Cooperation,” which depicts a relationship of trust between a prostitute and her pimp. An explanation of this will follow in the next chapter.

The Task of Stories That Serve as Commemoration and Hope

This collection features various forms of commemoration and remembrance for those who fell victim to historical catastrophes. While provocatively highlighting the vanished, it naturally draws the reader’s attention through various means to avoid falling into sentimentality.
The victims are sometimes presented as absolute others, as seen in “An Experiment in Love”; at other times, they appear as the missing persons desperately sought by other characters, or as the dead whose bodies others fight to claim. In this way, those sacrificed by history manifest themselves to the reader as a form of “absence.”
The task of the story does not stop at merely reenacting the cruelty of the past. A key aspect these works aim to achieve is enabling remembrance and memory to serve as a source of hope, and allowing the reader to discover meaning and reflect within those memories.

Absence and Hidden Characters in the Stories

For example, in the story “Miss Poja,” an unnamed Polish man appears. He is presumed to have been captured by the Nazis and forced into labor, and Miss Poja hides this fugitive in her home. Ms. Poja is attracted to him but hides her feelings. Eventually, he becomes romantically involved with Ms. Poja’s younger sister, Gloria, but the story never even reveals his name, nor does it mention his actions in any detail. He remains merely a figure who is always “absent” from the places Ms. Poja searches.
He is captured and disappears just before the end of the war, and Ms. Poja is unable to find him. She scours the ruined city in search of a body, finding corpses that have mostly been reduced to charred remains. Meanwhile, stories about Ms. Poja’s ancestors are rapidly introduced; they embody a history of twisted violence and reveal the outlines of the massive number of victims implied in the background.

The Grotesque and Irony of Short Stories

“Cooperative Attitude” reveals a somewhat unique form of cooperation. In this brief story, the wives who have lost their husbands are fighting over nothing other than the charred remains of a single man. They seek to divide up the dead man in order to erect a tombstone, and the grotesqueness felt in this situation evokes both poignant emotion and a hollow laugh. Once again, the reader is left with “mixed feelings”—unable to judge the situation one way or the other.
Furthermore, much like a footnote to the previously mentioned word “ruins,” the author reveals another story surrounding this corpse at the end of the tale, adding an ironic twist to the situation faced by the characters above. In this way, these short stories collide and overlap, leaving the reader with a variety of possible interpretations.

The Theatricality of Funerals and Death as an Empty Space

The funeral attendees featured in “The List of Funeral Attendees”—a supplementary piece to the 1974 edition of “Resumes”—share certain similarities with the wives in “The Cooperative Attitude.” The various relatives appearing in this story attended the funeral of Marie Pieringer, a woman who had led a deeply unhappy life, oppressed by her parents, the war, and her cold-hearted younger sister.
The relatives’ thoughts on this funeral vary widely, and while they blame one another for the cause of death—though it turns out no one is actually to blame—the funeral ultimately becomes merely an event, revealing that the attendees have no interest in the deceased and have come only to attend to their own respective duties.

Cooperation and Sensitivity in Bringing the Dead Back to Life

However, a unique story emerges in which the living bring the deceased back to life so that she no longer remains in a state of death. “The Deconstruction of Crime Through Cooperation” illustrates a case where proper remembrance and cooperation, through careful understanding and sensitivity, “bring the dead back to life.”
This story, which follows “Aleviš’s Diamond,” begins with Aleviš, a Yugoslavian who was the diamond’s last owner, coming to Frankfurt to sell it, only to be struck on the head with an iron bar by criminals, collapse, and be found dead in a prostitute’s lodgings. The process by which the prostitute Ingrid and her pimp Schleich work together to bring him back to life is both ambiguous and concrete, realistic and fantastical.
Kluge likens this process of resurrection to “birds of chance flying this way,” explaining that the prostitute’s sensitive intuition serves to awaken the dead man, thereby benefiting everyone involved. He views this festival as a celebration of rational responses and explains it as a way to rationally safeguard one’s own unique interests. Dealing with matters concerning the dead resembles what is known as divine recompense, and he believes that human actions contain forms of recompense that have been passed down since ancient times.

Sensibility and Automatism: The Expansion of ‘Gefühl’

The delicate sensibility (Fingerspitzengefühl) that Kluge speaks of—which revives the dead—encompasses the broad meaning of the German term ‘Gefühl’. This word encompasses sensation, emotion, and sometimes even intuition, and he defines it as “the exact opposite of automatism (Automatismus).” Automatic action refers to a state in which even emotions are controlled and dried up, leaving only instrumental reason to plow ahead by inertia.
In contrast to the inhuman and violent situations evident throughout the resumes, here, understanding and meticulous sensitivity are present, bringing the dead “back to life.” This story reads as the only hopeful one in the entire collection, though that hope carries the irony that the protagonists are sex workers devoid of love.

Reading the Story and the Allegory of Resurrection

Let’s take it a step further and interpret “the dismantling of crime through cooperation” as an allegory for the process of reading. In this story, the act of bringing the dead back to life occurs through the process of reading the story and the process of writing it. Unlike in other parts of the text, Kluge wrote this process of resurrection in the German present tense. He viewed this resurrection as a process currently unfolding in the reader’s mind.
Historical catastrophe drives humanity toward death, yet humans have no way to describe or grasp that extreme negativity. They can only present stories surrounding that absence. If we read these stories with keen senses and emotions, we can discern a form of existence within that absence. For Kluge, the task of the story lies precisely in bringing the victims of catastrophe back to life. And this may well be the proper way to commemorate them.

Repetition, Theatricality, and the Elimination of Evil

In an interview with the writer Heiner Müller, Kluge and Müller noted that the way to eliminate evil is not simply to kill or eradicate it, but to allow it to fade away naturally through the repetition of ritual. The reason Kluge ceaselessly repeats similar stories is that the clash and collaboration of these countless narratives have the effect of eliminating evil through a kind of theatricality.
It involves placing evil on the stage and repeatedly practicing its elimination until, eventually, no one takes any interest in it anymore. Since Kluge always compiles short pieces—typically around a few pages each—into his works, he does not write full-length novels. His literary output consists of collections of short stories ranging from dozens to hundreds of pieces, through which one can discern his mode of thought and the recurrence of his themes.

Self-irony and a warning regarding the professionalization of storytelling

This raises a question. So, in modern society, are those who repeatedly engage with stories—that is, scholars, educators, and especially humanities scholars—always serving the hopes of humanity? Kluge’s self-irony is revealed precisely at this point. “Resumes” repeatedly demonstrates just how powerless humanities scholars are in reality and how easily scholarship can be distorted.
Stories such as “E. Schinke,” “Career Change,” “Klopfau’s Educator,” and “The Scholar’s Mission—Mandorf” serve as sharp critiques of such powerlessness and distortion; they are both a warning and a memorial to those who have made storytelling their profession. Nevertheless, the stories continue, and we cannot abandon storytelling itself.

Songs of Hope and Personal Resumes

The paradoxical title, “Those Who Always Hold onto Hope Die Singing,” hints at the literary recurrence of evil and the struggle to eradicate it. In this story, reminiscent of the Eastern proverb “A blessing in disguise,” the protagonist faces a situation of ceaselessly recurring evil, yet human beings are, in the end, beings who cannot abandon hope.
New hope may always bring new circumstances and new evil. Yet at the same time, by repeatedly telling the story (singing the song) of that evil, we overcome it within ourselves and can once again embrace new hope. These personal narratives are precisely such songs.