"Langer, by the force of scholarship and literary precision rather than dogmatic affirmation and pathos, is one of the few writers, with the exception of significant poets and novelists, who unsettles both our customary language and conceptual instruments. His book is a moral as well as an intellectual act of a very high order." —Geoffrey Hartman, author of The Longest Shadow
In this new volume, Langer—one of the most distinguished scholars writing on Holocaust literature and representation—assesses various literary efforts to establish a place in modern consciousness for the ordeal of those victimized by Nazi Germany's crimes against humanity. Essays discuss the film Life Is Beautiful, the uncritical acclaim of Fragments, the fake memoir by Benjamin Wilkomirski, reasons for the exaggerated importance still given to Anne Frank's Diary, and a recent cycle of paintings on the Old Testament by Holocaust artist Samuel Bak.
"Langer, by the force of scholarship and literary precision rather than dogmatic affirmation and pathos, is one of the few writers, with the exception of significant poets and novelists, who unsettles both our customary language and conceptual instruments. His book is a moral as well as an intellectual act of a very high order." —Geoffrey Hartman, author of The Longest Shadow
In this new volume, Langer—one of the most distinguished scholars writing on Holocaust literature and representation—assesses various literary efforts to establish a place in modern consciousness for the ordeal of those victimized by Nazi Germany's crimes against humanity. Essays discuss the film Life Is Beautiful, the uncritical acclaim of Fragments, the fake memoir by Benjamin Wilkomirski, reasons for the exaggerated importance still given to Anne Frank's Diary, and a recent cycle of paintings on the Old Testament by Holocaust artist Samuel Bak.
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"Langer, by the force of scholarship and literary precision rather than dogmatic affirmation and pathos, is one of the few writers, with the exception of significant poets and novelists, who unsettles both our customary language and conceptual instruments. His book is a moral as well as an intellectual act of a very high order." —Geoffrey Hartman, author of The Longest Shadow
In this new volume, Langer—one of the most distinguished scholars writing on Holocaust literature and representation—assesses various literary efforts to establish a place in modern consciousness for the ordeal of those victimized by Nazi Germany's crimes against humanity. Essays discuss the film Life Is Beautiful, the uncritical acclaim of Fragments, the fake memoir by Benjamin Wilkomirski, reasons for the exaggerated importance still given to Anne Frank's Diary, and a recent cycle of paintings on the Old Testament by Holocaust artist Samuel Bak.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253023513 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/21/2006 |
| Series: | Jewish Literature and Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 438 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Lawrence L. Langer is Professor of English Emeritus at Simmons College, Boston. Among his numerous books are Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Preempting the Holocaust; and The Game Continues: Chess in the Art of Samuel Bak (IUP, 1999). He lives in West Newton, Massachusetts.
Read an Excerpt
Using and Abusing the Holocaust
By Lawrence L. Langer
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2006 Lawrence L. LangerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34745-9
CHAPTER 1
THE PURSUIT OF DEATH IN HOLOCAUST NARRATIVE
Autobiographical narrative by its very nature explores a journey that has not yet reached its end. One study of the genre by James Olney is called Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing. It occurs to me that a study of Holocaust memory and narrative might justifiably be subtitled "The Weave of Death-Writing." Although Holocaust testimonies and memoirs are of course concerned with how one went on living in the midst of German atrocities, their subtexts offer us a theme that is more difficult to express or to understand: how, under those minimal conditions, slowly but inexorably, one went on dying — every day, every hour, every minute of one's agonizing existence. We are forced to redefine the meaning of survival, as the assertive idea of staying alive is offset by the reactive one of fending off death. The impact on consciousness of this dilemma is a neglected but important legacy of the experience we call the Holocaust.
The Holocaust survivors I am speaking of do not merely recover their lives in their narratives. Through complex associations with their murdered comrades, family members, and communities they also recover what I call their missed destiny of death. Because the logic of existence in places such as Auschwitz dictated that one should die, witnesses often feel that survival was an abnormal result of their ordeal in the camps, a violation of the expected outcome of their detention. They were not meant to return. Charlotte Delbo calls the first volume of her Auschwitz memoir Aucun de nous ne reviendra (None of Us Will Return). This response has nothing to do with guilt or what some label a death wish but with a stubborn intuition that unlike the others, through accident or luck, those who held out somehow mistakenly eluded their intended end. In many instances the sensation of being dead while alive reflects a dual thrust of their present being: in chronological time they seek their future while in durational time, those isolated moments of dreadful memories do not dissipate but congeal into dense claws of tenacious consciousness. A lethal past relentlessly pursues them.
According to Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry, mass murder in the form of genocide forced its victims to live not next door to but in the same room as death. Distinguishing between the violence of war and the rigid milieu of the camps, Améry observed: "The soldier was driven into the fire, and it is true his life was not worth much. Still, the state did not order him to die, but to survive. The final duty of the prisoner, however, was death" In other words, the necessity of dying replaced the possibility of dying, even as many inmates struggled to stay alive — which is different from resolving to survive. Their surroundings, rather than some internal system of values inherited from normal life, infiltrated the mental content of their days. What this meant can be illustrated by two brief excerpts from witness testimonies. Renee H., who was little more than ten years old at the time, recalls a scene from Bergen-Belsen:
Right across from us was a charnel house filled with corpses, not just inside but overflowing all over. There were corpses all over. I lived, walked beside dead people. After a while it just got to be so that no one noticed, and one had to say to oneself, "I am not going to see who it is. I am not going to recognize anyone in this person who is lying there." It got to a point where I realized that I had to close my eyes to a number of things. Otherwise I would not have survived even at that time, because I saw people around me going mad. I was not only having to live with all things, but with madness.
We need to imagine how such imagery imprints itself on consciousness, despite efforts to avoid the unavoidable; but even more, we need to acknowledge the impact of such imagery on the unfolding of Holocaust narrative as memory stumbles repeatedly over death while seeking to recount episodes of life in the camps under conditions of atrocity.
The second example is both more vivid and more graphic. It documents with uncanny if unintended precision a moment of failed purgation, as if the body were seeking to expel what memory could not cast out from consciousness:
I got a job carrying people's waste out from the barrack at night. ... I was very sick. I got diarrhea. That was already recuperating a little bit from the malaria. I walked out with two pails of human waste and I was going toward the dump. I walked out, and between the barracks was a mountain of people as high as myself. The people died at night, they were just taken out on the dump — you know, a big pile of people. And I said to myself "O God. Must I walk by?" But in the meanwhile, I couldn't hold back, and I just put down the two pails and I sit down because I had a sick stomach. And the rats were standing and eating the people's faces — eating, you know, they were having a ... [long silence]. Anyway, I had to do my job. I was just looking, what's happening to a human being. That could have been my mother. That could have been my father. That could have been my sister or my brother.
The sheer physicality of Hanna F.'s description would dampen the ardor of those who insist on the triumph of the spirit even in Auschwitz, which is the locale of this remembered episode. The fusion of excrement, corpses, and predatory rats creates a cluster of images that forces us to redefine our notion of dying. At that moment the witness seemed to be trapped by a cycle of decay from which there was no escape. The cherished idea of the family as an intimate unit succumbed momentarily to the horrible alternative of the family as prey for hungry rodents. We are left numbed by the challenge of absorbing into our hopes for a human future this grim heritage of unnatural death.
I said that the witness succumbed momentarily to a new and unprecedented vision of her family's fate, but this was more a charitable concession than a discovered truth. Such images may lurk in consciousness undeciphered, but they inspire insight only after being filtered through a mind determined to wrestle with the implications of the harsh burden that the Germans imposed on their victims. Jean Améry spent his post-camp life, which ended in suicide, unsuccessfully trying to placate the ghost of unnatural death that plagued him after his survival. In his now classic work, At the Mind's Limits, he reported:
There was once a conversation in the camp about an SS man who had slit open a prisoner's belly and filled it with sand. It is obvious that in view of such possibilities one was hardly concerned with whether, or that, one had to die, but with how it would happen. Inmates carried on conversations about how long it probably takes for the gas in the gas chambers to do its job. One speculated on the painfulness of death by phenol injections. Were you to wish yourself a blow to the skull or a slow death through exhaustion in the infirmary? It was characteristic for the situation of the prisoner in regard to death that only a few decided to "run to the wire," as one said, that is, to commit suicide through contact with the highly electrified barbed wire. The wire was after all a good and rather certain thing, but it was possible that in the attempt to approach it one would be caught first and thrown into the bunker, and that led to a more difficult and more painful dying. Dying was omnipresent, death vanished from sight. (17)
Améry's variations on a theme of dying in Auschwitz leave little space for consolation. "These were the conditions under which the intellectual collided with death," he concluded. "Death lay before him, and in him the spirit was still stirring; the latter confronted the former and tried — in vain, to say it straight off — to exemplify its dignity" (16).
Dying among the living, even when it is abrupt and painful, is a termination, and for those left behind society provides rituals of closure, including grief for the departed — we even have an appropriate vocabulary of solace — to ease the separation. But dying among the dying leaves us with no analogy to help us imagine the ordeal and find a suitable place in consciousness to lodge it. We have few narratives that portray such dying and its effect on traditional versions of the self. Améry's prisoners who discuss their possible doom bear no agency for their fate. They are left with a permanent uncertainty about the responsibility for their anguish, unable to blame a gas chamber or a hypodermic needle or the crushing force of a club. The absence of an identifiable human killer that allows one to trace a clear path from cause to effect is joined by another important hiatus that afflicts the memory of survivors, and that is the missing ritual of mourning. This is complicated by the foreknowledge that their own dying, when it occurs, will preclude a similar ritual for themselves. Permanently barred from details of how members of their families died, witnesses often seem less distressed by the illogic of those early deaths than by the "illogic" of their own continued lives. The psychic discontinuity implicit in such experience prevents the death of others — really, the murder of others — from being integrated into the natural rhythms of existence, leaving the survivor vainly groping for some tie between consequential living and inconsequential dying. The former is the text, the latter the subtext of numerous Holocaust narratives, oral and written, leading to a constant tension between pursuit and escape as divided consciousness seeks to integrate what cannot be reconciled — except perhaps in the ambiguous landscape of art.
The rift in time and memory that separates the unnatural death of others from one's own staying alive cries out for a bridge, but continuity is not its name. The vision of decay that reminds Hanna F. of her family's wretched end spreads its sway over the surrounding narrative terrain, contaminating efforts to soothe the transition from past to present or to free one to enter tranquilly into the future. The view that Holocaust survivors should be able to generalize their anguish in order to leave behind them the aura of death derives from unfamiliarity with how durational time assails the memory of so many witnesses. On the deepest level, a large number of their life stories are also death stories, which include the partial death of the self in ways that still need to be interpreted. The quest for a rebirth of that part of the self is as futile as would be any effort to transform Hanna F. 's pile of corpses into a sacred community of the dead. This may be a dark view, but there is overwhelming evidence from Holocaust narratives that it is a realistic one, from which we have much to learn. The effect of atrocity, and not only Holocaust atrocity, on the modern sensibility is a virgin territory into which few analysts have yet ventured.
One of the many victims of these narratives is the very notion that we can expel from consciousness, and hence from being, zones of memory that threaten our intact spirits. Unnatural death creates an inversion of normality that we cannot easily dismiss. In her Auschwitz trilogy, Charlotte Delbo crafts a monologue by a fellow survivor named Mado that, because of its stylized intensity, approaches the level of art, but nonetheless conveys the despair of a woman who is denied the remission of amnesia. She begins: "It seems to me I'm not alive. Since all are dead, it seems impossible that I shouldn't be also. All dead. ... All the others, all the others. How could those stronger and more determined than I be dead, and I remain alive? Can one come out of there alive? No, it wasn't possible. ... I'm not alive. I see myself from outside this self pretending to be alive. I'm not alive. I know this with an intimate, solitary knowledge."
Mado's paradoxical refrain — "I'm not alive" — accents the need for a narrative form to capture the post-war effects of the daily rule during her imprisonment that to be alive was to be a candidate for death. Delbo has taken the liberty of discarding the chronological text of her friend's testimony, forcing us to face the full, unblemished impact of Auschwitz time.
The thrust of Mado's existence is backwards, as if loyalty to her dead and sometimes murdered friends requires her to embrace a rupture between then and now that infiltrates and finally pollutes the purity of her aspirations toward the future. When her son is born she tries to feel happy. But memory will not allow her to. "The silky water of myjoy," she says, "changed to sticky mud, sooty snow, fetid marshes. I saw again this woman — you remember this peasant woman, lying in the snow, dead, with her dead newborn frozen between her thighs. My son was also that newborn" (261–262). Thus even her present family is shrouded by the subtext of dying in the camps. The challenge of learning how to live while continuing to participate in the unnatural death of others haunts Mado as a persistent melancholy legacy from that time.
As the habit of "holding out" then nurtures in Mado the practice of "making do" now, a psychology of endurance breeds in her a new sense of who she is, of what she has become. She recalls her companions arguing in the camps that if they returned home after the war, everything would be different. But they were wrong. "Everything is the same," Mado discovers. "It is within us that nothing is the same" (263). This represents not a loss of identity but a shift in identity, a painfully honest confession that the self has been split not by some psychotic condition but by the twin realities that inhabit her spirit. Mado admits that to forget the durational subtext in order to return to the chronological narrative of her life would be atrocious, then adds that it would be impossible too. "People believe memories grow vague," she ends her monologue, "are erased by time, since nothing endures against the passage of time. That's the difference: time does not pass over me, over us. It doesn't erase anything, doesn't undo it. I'm not alive. I died in Auschwitz but no one knows it" (267).
Of course, Mado is right. No one but she and Delbo and the few dozen other Frenchwomen who returned from their transport to Auschwitz can expect to enter the dark inner realm where the theme of being dead while alive enacts its paradoxical drama. Yet perhaps she is mistaken too. Her words allow us to see feelingly, then to imagine the contours of that alien world, and the missed destiny of death that assaults it. An alliance with atrocity is part of the burden of modernity, though it is both simpler and less troublesome to pretend that it is not. Atrocity narrative requires us to abandon the conviction that the gift of life is antithetical to the menace of unnatural death. Writers like Delbo entreat us to discard this consoling template of reality as a remnant of an ancient nostalgia rather than retaining it as a still useful blueprint for designing the future after Auschwitz.
Sometimes episodes surface in Holocaust testimonies that seem to transgress our sense of the possible, to reveal a reality so beyond our imaginings that we rush to consign them to the realm of fantasy. But anyone immersed in this world of atrocity will be forced to concede that few powers of invention could conjure up some of the most gruesome moments of the camp experience. From an eyewitness in the Natzweiler concentration camp comes the following account to confirm the intricate bond linking living and dying for the victimized in the Holocaust universe:
On July 8, 1942, I was witness to a terrifying event that will never fade from my memory. In the corridor of the infirmary stood six coffins in a stack. They were crates hammered together of rough boards, out of which blood seeped through the joints. Suddenly a knocking could be heard from the bottom coffin. A weak voice quavered, "Open up! Open up! I am still alive!" The greens [deported criminals] pulled out the bottom coffin and opened it. A Polish prisoner with an injured head and broken legs stared out at us from the coffin, in which he was lying with a dead man. I wanted to intervene, to free him from his terrifying situation, but I was immediately pushed aside by one of the professional criminals. A few dull thuds, then the coffin was nailed shut again and sent to the crematorium.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Using and Abusing the Holocaust by Lawrence L. Langer. Copyright © 2006 Lawrence L. Langer. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. The Pursuit of Death in Holocaust Narrative
2. Anne Frank Revisited
3. Life Is Not Beautiful
4. Fragments of Memory: A Myth of Past Time
5. Wounded Families in Holocaust Discourse
6. Memory and Justice after the Holocaust and Apartheid
7. Witnessing Atrocity: The Testimonial Evidence
8. Moralizing and Demoralizing the Holocaust
9. Representing the Holocaust
10. The Book of Genesis in the Art of Samuel Bak
Notes
Index