rainer emig
believe.^24 Responsibility,also for hurting and killing and making decisions, includ-
ing wrong ones, is what in the final consequence makes us human. Our ethical task,
Auden’s poem argues in the context of an unpredictable civil war, which attracted
as many egotistical investments as it stimulated utopian hopes and dreams, is to
turn this human potential into attempts at civilized and humane lives.
(^24) Auden, ‘Foreword’, inCollected Shorter Poems 1927–1957(London: Faber, 1966), 15.