[September 2003 journal entry]
Dietrich, in his December 1942 ‘After Ten Years’ essay written for his family and his fellow conspirators, confessed crossing a crucial threshold when he assigned ‘incomparable (unparalleled) value’ to seeing ‘from below’, from the perspective of the sufferer. Crossing this threshold means embracing and resolving to sustain the experience of seeing ‘from below’, the experience of seeing from the perspective of the sufferer. Koheleth, in the Ecclesiastes essay, clearly had not yet crossed that threshold. I think it may be inferred that the author of the expanded version of the story/play Job had crossed that threshold, though no character in the story/play makes such a decision explicit in the text.
