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What Are Writers Doing to The Holocaust?

Josephine Knopp (Sh'ma 7/133 April 29, 1977)

In the aftermath of Auschwitz, now more than 30 years behind us, the Holocaust has come to refer to more than the historical event of the slaughter of six million Jews. Historian Uriel Tal, in his gentle manner and passionate voice, often speaks of the Holocaust as an indicator of the existential and intellectual crisis of man. Psychologist Robert Jay Lifton broadens the application of the term, including Hiroshima within the scope of his definition of Holocaust, as well as the death of some hundred miners in a small Southeastern town in the United States - victims of bureaucratic greed and criminal neglect. The appellation Holocaust is often applied to the slaughter of the Armenians by the Turks, to the treatment of the American Indians by the early United States government, and to the incarceration of the Japanese in the United States during World War II, as well as to the death of the one million gypsies and the thousands of Slavs who were caught up in the "war against the Jews."

Pierre Auberey, literary critic, is especially sensitive to "those innocent bystanders" caught in the mire of "repression and persecution," and while he admits "to the long Jewish experience with persecution," he refuses to see that as "particularly unique and without parallel," because 'it has been so often repeated during the long history of the Hebrew people." For Auberey, "the Jews were not quite as helpless as the millions of ordinary workers deported to labor camps, prison camps of Germany at the whim of their employers or personal enemies, if they were identified as militant organizers with radical affiliations. No one spoke for those millions, no one supported them in words or deeds during the darkest years of the war and when they tried to resist underground they could only hope for instant death if they fell into the hands of the Nazi." Professor Auberey concludes that "the holocaust was not a specifically Jewish ordeal," and while he does not say so directly, he implies that in viewing the Holocaust as Jewish atrocity one becomes a spokesman for special interests.

The Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod, himself a refugee from Hiter's Germany, offers a radically different perspective upon Auschwitz, affirming its uniqueness - " I am not persuaded by the argument that the holocaust is just an instance of the ancient problem of evil," - but at the same time refusing to respond to it in his theology: "There is no salvation to be extracted from the Holocaust, no faltering Judaism can be revived by it, no new reason for the continuation of the Jewish people can be found in it. if there is hope after the Holocaust it is because to those who believe, the voices of the Prophets speak more loudly than did Hitler, and because the divine promise sweeps over the crematoria and silences the voice of Auschwitz. The God of Israel is a redeeming God; this is the only message we are authorized to proclaim."

The holocaust remains a uniquely jewish tragedy

It is hard to deny the interconnectedness of all atrocities, as examples of "man's inhumanity to man" to use that overworked but still apt phrase. However, in my view the Nazi attempt to exterminate world Jewry stands apart as the terrible culmination of that long and tragic history of anti-Semitism to which Auberey refers. Thus, despite Auberey's contention that Jew hatred results from class conflicts, he himself offers evidence that it involves something far more, that anti-Semitism in fact transcends politics and political systems. It is well to remember that the Endlösung, the "'Final Solution," was a program of apocalyptic and eschatological dimensions designed to apply specifically and exclusively to the "Jewish question." The successful extermination of world Jewry was to mark a watershed in human and theological history, equal in its implications to nothing less than the Crucifixion, and consequently the program was carried forward with a "religious" zeal worthy of the prophetic. Complete Nazi success doubtless would have heralded the end of man as we have known him, especially in his moral and religious dimensions. An ironic sidelight emerges from an attempt to imagine the consequences for Christianity had Hitler been successful in completely destroying the Jewish people. One cataclysmic outcome assuredly speculative but not without theological basis - would have been the ultimate demise of Christianity itself, and for Judaism, the completion of the circle: Christianity, arising in part as a consequence of presumed Jewish aid to the executioner, destroyed by the Jew's final victimization. To our eternal sorrow, the Endlösung did come frighteningly close to completion of its goal, at least in Europe, with the inescapable consequence that - Wyschogrod's theology notwithstanding - the post-Holocaust world is in fact a radically altered place, its basic values and assumptions displaced beyond the point of return by the Nazi exploration in new regions of terror.

Art must convey this reality to those not sharing it.

This altered frame of reference and its profound ramifications for all of art and culture cannot be ignored with impunity by the literary critic who would approach the rapidly growing body of imaginative literary works emerging from the Holocaust. This view can be amplified by a consideration of Wyschogrod's perspective upon art as a response to Auschwitz. Consistent with his theological position, Wyschogrod denies flatly the appropriateness of art to the Holocaust. "Art takes the sting out of suffering," he has said. "It transforms suffering into a catharsis ... Any attempt to transform the holocaust into art demeans the holocaust and must result in poor art." Clearly, Wyschogrod has in mind a conception of the nature and function of art grounded upon Aristotle. But far more relevant to an understanding of Holocaust literature are the twentieth century insights of Albert Camus: "Art, in a sense, is a revolt against everything fleeting and unfinished in the world. Consequently, its only aim is to give another form to a reality that it is nevertheless forced to preserve as the source of its emotion." Lawrence Langer, in his study, 7'he Holocaust and the Literary Imagination develops this idea and applies it to.Holocaust literature. "All serious art," he observes, "undoubtedly aspires toward the revelation of a new sense of reality," but Holocaust literature has the curious advantage of having such a 'new' reality already available, pressing with equal force on the conscious and preconscious life of the artist, and seeking only a way of being convincingly presented to an audience of contemporary readers."

Indeed, the problem for the writer who adopts the Holocaust as a domain for literary scrutiny is in a sense the reverse of the usual problem confronting the creator of imaginative literature, who strives to imbue his work - whether or not based upon actual events - with sufficient fantasy to warrant that appellation. The Holocaust writer - virtually alone among writers - faces the difficulty of making a factual subject believable, of informing the actuality he describes with an aura of reality acceptable as such to his readers. The true mission of Holocaust literature, therefore, lies not in Aristotelian catharsis - which, after all, would function to preserve the old verities, the relatively orderly sensibilities of the old, pre-Holocaust universe - but rather in the urgent need to break through the barrier of non-acceptance engendered by an absence of that core of shared experience and sensibility upon which other literature may rely, in response to Camus' charge to preserve and give another form to the reality of Auschwitz.

How do we analyze holocaust literature?

This said, however, criticism still faces the difficult task of defining the boundaries of Holocaust literature, at least with enough precision to facilitate rational discussion and interpretation. An obvious question is whether writers from circumstances far removed from the Holocaust Universe can - or should - write of the event, as some indeed have done. As "outsiders" such writers must surely experience the difficulty - perhaps magnified and intensified - in moving across the threshold of ordinary reality into the special and distorted reality of the Holocaust Universe that besets the reader of Holocaust literature. My basic instinct opposes universalization of the Holocaust, and this position may carry with it the implication - or at least the suggestion - that only those who have experienced it first-hand can produce literature which transmits the Holocaust Universe authentically. Yet it is now certainly too soon, we are still too close to the event, to formulate definitive judgements of this sort -judgements which time might well alter or overturn completely.

In connection with writings of the survivors themselves - works which have formed and will continue to form the essential core of the genre - analysis and debate, only recently begun, will most certainly broaden and intensify. Among these writings of "insiders" differences must be observed closely, and distinctions drawn - for example, between those which employ the Holocaust as backdrop, or perhaps as a clue to what man has become in our time and what he is yet capable of becoming, and those works that take on the weight of midrash upon and metaphor for the very historical events which they describe, with the Holocaust experience itself, as mankind's focal center, emerging as the central literary vision.

Alvin Rosenfeld, for one, has called attention to the need for contemporary criticism to develop "a phenomenology of reading Holocaust literature," a critical language which can distinguish sensitively and meaningfully among the writings of the victims, the different kinds of survivors, and "those who were never there but know more than the outlines of the place." The present gap in our critical language renders the literary discourse tentative and uncertain for the time being, but not impossible. Nor does it reflect unfavorably upon those who have pursued such discourse. Rather, it throws into relief the essential difficulties attendant upon study of the Holocaust from the perspective of any established discipline. From the critical perspective these problems are characterized by the intermingling of genres, by the frequent breakdown of the usual categories distinguishing diary from novel, literal account from imaginative fiction, and - more important - by the impossibility of identifying those works which would best reward close reading without adopting a perspective broader than the traditional frame of reference of literary criticism.

Who should speak about this event?

Of course the problems that arise for literary criticism out of the difficult case of Holocaust literature inevitably raise questions about the nature of the discipline itself: who is the rightful critic? how much should we trust him? what forces have shaped his Weltanschauung? Can one, for example, trust Francois Mauriac when, describing his meeting with Elie Wiesel in the introduction to Night, he writes: "Did I affirm that the stumbling block to (Wiesel's) faith (that is, man's suffering) was the cornerstone of mine ... ?" For another revealing example we may return once again to Pierre Auberey, who asserts that Wiesel "manages to be relevant to all of us because in his novels he constantly transcends the problems of Jewish identity." That Auberey is a critic of clear Marxist orientation, one who feels that "true identity is determined by our position in the labor market and our place in the hierarchical structure of the organizations to which we belong," surely must weigh in our assessment of his view of Wiesel's relationship to Jewish identity. Wiesel's own words suggest strongly that if he transcends his Jewish identity, it is only by remaining firmly - even ferociously - within it, despite the unspeakable suffering and the mass killings. Indeed, precisely because the Jew historically has been victimized so frequently and by such a diversity of peoples, Wiesel, as a Jewish victim, can speak for all victims, and hence for all of mankind.