Provokacija

The Eleventh Pamphlet brings a translation of Stanisław Lem’s Provocation – a review of a nonexistent work by the equally fictitious author Horst Aspernicus: Der Völkermord. I. Die Endlösung als Erlösung II. Fremdkörper Tod (Göttingen, 1980). The text belongs to the genre of imaginary reviews, a form Lem mastered and used to grapple with a broad range of questions and themes. These, however, are not mere reviews, but rather spaces for intellectual play and for thought experiments. Provocation is one such work. First published in 1980, it is, in essence, Lem’s take on the Holocaust and the trauma that marked his youth in Lviv. He returned to these themes repeatedly in his writing, most explicitly in His Master’s Voice, Highcastle: A Remembrance, and Tales of Pirx the Pilot. In its fictitious thematisation of a traumatic historical events, Provocation is eerily relevant today, in an era of post-truth, escalating wars and violence, in a time when militarization erodes freedom, human rights, and care for others.