–– Responsible Irresponsibility ––
Paul A. Levine (1956–2019)
Paul A. Levine, who left this world on October 28, 2019, would probably have smiled — wryly, perhaps — at the irony of his own afterlife. A committed Hegelian, he loved to observe how contradictions define existence, and he even coined his own dialectical epitaph: “responsible irresponsibility.” Those who knew him recall that he wanted these words engraved on his tombstone — his final intellectual wink at the world.
And yet, in a twist worthy of his own lectures on history’s paradoxes, Paul was buried not under a stone bearing his words, but in a collective grave marked only by a small metal plate listing sixteen names, including “Paul Levine,” a spelling that erases both his middle name and part of his identity. No stone to touch. Just an anonymous patch of ground — restlessly reshaped, as cemeteries now do, six times in as many years.
But perhaps, as Paul might have said, history itself has a dark sense of humor. What could be more fitting for a Historian of the Holocaust — a Man who spent his life exposing the mechanics of forgetting — than to become, in death, a casualty of bureaucratic oblivion?
From this contradiction, however, emerged an act of creative defiance: “A Traveling Tombstone”. Together with sculptor Robert Schmidt-Matt, three natural stone sculptures were created to carry Paul’s oxymoronic legacy across lands and cities — from Berlin to New York, from Toronto to The Hague.
In the end, Paul’s memory travels, debates, provokes — as he always did. His absence, too, teaches. Responsible? Irresponsible? – Both, of course.
In eternal gratitude and dialectical remembrance.
Yours,
Elena Medvedev
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