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Reviewed by:
  • Using and Abusing the Holocaust
  • David H. Jones
Using and Abusing the Holocaust, Lawrence L. Langer ( Bloomington : Indiana University Press , 2006 ), xix + 165 pp., $29.95 .

Readers familiar with Lawrence Langer’s distinguished writings on Holocaust literature and representation will welcome this new collection. Four of the ten essays are new, and all but one of the others have been revised substantially. Langer is preoccupied with the daunting task of how to write about or artistically depict the Holocaust without evading or falsifying the extreme evil of the multiple crimes involved. According to Langer, all too often writers and artists are insufficiently acquainted with the gruesome details of how, when, and where these abominations were carried out, or with the full extent of the traumatic demoralizing effects they had on victims, survivors, and bystanders. In some cases writers and artists ignore the full extent of the evil in order to offer the public a softer and more assuring view of the Holocaust. This evasion may or may not be willful, but either way, its effect tends to be the same. Such authors and artists seek a sense of hope and redemption that Langer believes is not justified by the historical record. Moreover, they apparently see little need critically to examine conventional ways of responding to genocide and mass death, even though (in Langer’s view) these were rendered inadequate by the Holocaust.

Langer rejects such responses not because he thinks that the Holocaust was an unprecedented evil to which there can be no adequate response. In “Witnessing Atrocity,” referring to the psychological experience of “dying while living” (or what Langer also calls “deathlife”) frequently encountered in the testimony of survivors, Langer states: “It banishes ‘triumphalism’ from the definition of survival and substitutes a harsh if not insoluble dilemma in the dictionary of experience in an era that has been tarnished by so much mass murder. And of course we need not restrict ourselves to the Holocaust when considering this question” (p. 101, emphasis added). In the same essay Langer observes that “the Holocaust has gained its ‘exemplary’ status not because of any special priority it has earned as a calamity more terrible than any other, but because it continues to be the most widely researched and publicized crime among several of its kind during the past hundred years” (p. 110). Langer believes that because there is so much historical, psychological, and testimonial information about the Holocaust, there is no justification for representations of it that pander to the public demand for comforting illusions. If Langer is right about this (and I think he is), all the more disturbing are his critical accounts in Using and Abusing the Holocaust of a number of glaring examples of such cant. [End Page 110]

Nowhere is the problem more evident than in the popular understanding of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, based in large part on “a long and ‘respectable’—though maybe we should begin to call it disreputable—tradition of misjudging the content of the volume” (p. 25). In “Anne Frank Revisited” Langer provides several telling examples, starting with Meyer Levin’s conclusion in 1952 that “this wise and wonderful young girl brings back a poignant delight in the infinite human spirit” (pp. 22–23). Langer points out that the diary, written entirely while Anne and her family were hiding in comparative safety and comfort, is essentially (in Levin’s own words) a “drama of puberty” with “its sibling rivalry, conflicts with parents, adolescent romance, and awakening sexuality” (p. 22). Moreover, before their arrest the Frank family learned nothing at all about the ghettos, concentration camps, or killing centers (p. 20). Despite that, Langer notes, “as early as 1946 one of the first ‘discoverers’ wrote in a Dutch review that [Anne Frank’s diary] embodied ‘all the hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence at Nuremberg put together’” (p. 25). Another of Langer’s examples of critical misjudgment is that by a reviewer of the “definitive” 1995 edition, who “did not hesitate to call it ‘the single most compelling personal account of the Holocaust,’ as if Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, to name only two, were...

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