{"id":74815,"date":"2026-10-15T11:45:29","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T09:45:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/?p=74815"},"modified":"2026-10-15T11:45:41","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T09:45:41","slug":"what-we-are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/what-we-are\/","title":{"rendered":"What We Are"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>May 27, 1992. In Sarajevo, where Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Jews had lived together peacefully for centuries, a grenade kills 22 people waiting in line for bread outside a bakery. The next day, cellist Vedran Smailovi\u0107 plays Tomaso Albinoni\u2019s Adagio in G minor at this site of horror and does so for 22 consecutive days. The performance is a lament and a hymn, a protest and a prayer. Word spreads throughout the city; it is broadcast on the radio, becomes the subject of a novel, and captures the imagination of humanity. Twenty-two days of music that are etched into the earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Susan Cain uses this story to open her book <em>Bittersweet<\/em>.<span id='easy-footnote-1-74815' class='easy-footnote-margin-adjust'><\/span><span class='easy-footnote'><a href='https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/what-we-are\/#easy-footnote-bottom-1-74815' title='Susan Cain, &lt;em&gt;Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole&lt;\/em&gt;, Crown, 2022.'><sup>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> In it, she explores how the transformative power of the soul thrives in pain, longing, and suffering. Just as Aristotle ennobled the human soul 2,500 years ago in <em>De Anima<\/em>, Cain ennobles it through her praise of melancholy, the temperament of introspection. She concludes the passage on Smailovi\u0107\u2019s performance by putting into words what music\u2014the most soulful of the arts\u2014has to say about war and violence: \u201cWe are not fighters,\u201d the violins exclaim. \u201cWe are not victims,\u201d the violas reply. \u201cWe are only human,\u201d sing the cellos, \u201csimply human: full of flaws and full of beauty\u2014we all long for love.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Translation<\/strong> Laura Liska<br><strong>Image<\/strong> Vedran Smailovi\u0107 in the destroyed National Library, 1992. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev, <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CC BY-SA 3.0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>May 27, 1992. In Sarajevo, where Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Jews had lived together peacefully for centuries, a grenade kills 22 people waiting in line for bread outside a bakery. The next day, cellist Vedran Smailovi\u0107 plays Tomaso Albinoni\u2019s Adagio in G minor at this site of horror and does so for 22 consecutive days. The performance is a lament and a hymn, a protest and a prayer. Word spreads throughout the city; it is broadcast on the radio, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9159,"featured_media":74392,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8796],"tags":[11843,11846,8819],"class_list":["post-74815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-column","tag-ausgabe-38-2026-en","tag-english-issue-42-2026","tag-seeds"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9159"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74815"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74826,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74815\/revisions\/74826"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}