Victims-in-Waiting: Backshadowing and the Representation of European Jewry

For Amos Funkenstein, 1937–1995

There are no witnesses of the concentration camp phenomenon in all its totality. There are only witnesses to daily, partial facts.

Pierre-Serge Choumoff, in Les échos de la mémoire ¹

I

In Zakhor, his poignant study of “Jewish History and Jewish Memory,” Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi calculates that “the Holocaust has already engendered more historical research than any single event in Jewish history.” ² And yet, Yerushalmi goes on to insist that there is “no doubt whatever that its [the Holocaust’s] image is being shaped, not at the historian’s anvil, but in the novelist’s crucible” (98). But if it is true that the modes of sense-making and formal emplotment of the two genres can never simply be collapsed together, the distinction between the ways in which the historian and the novelist structure their narratives is neither as absolute nor as easy to demarcate as Yerushalmi’s antithesis requires. ³ The gravity of the catastrophe, as well as its radical implications for our understanding of modernity, have made the ethics of representation itself an unavoidable question, directly inflecting, and often even circumscribing, both the interpretive and the rhetorical choices within which any discourse, whether fictional or historical, can be cast and still seem ethically responsible to its subject matter. ⁴ More strictly than with most other themes, there is a strong and articulate critical consensus that serious works about the Shoah need to acknowledge and explicitly register the problematic nature of their undertaking. A certain self-restraint of the interpretive imagination must be seen to accompany the scrupulousness with which factual evidence is assembled, analyzed, and deployed, and this obligation arises irrespective of the genre or the particular medium of representation.

Yet for all its apparent rigor, as soon as one begins to probe the actual terms of that ethical demand, it is curious how narrowly conceived its range really is: all of its strictures and prohibitions apply exclusively to the depiction of the victims directly caught up in the genocide. There is no parallel attentiveness to the ethical burden of representation when the subject is the lives of those same people in the years before they became victims of the Nazi terror. The requirements of historical carefulness, allied to imaginative austerity, that are regarded as the minimum conditions of acceptable narratives about the process of extermination, are seen as pertinent to European Jewry only after the initial stages of their annihilation have already begun. Not only are narratives about the lives of European Jews before the Nazi accession to state power not hedged with any of the protective taboos that govern direct representations of the Shoah, but, on the contrary, especially in postwar Zionist fiction and historiography, it is often the very obliteration of so many of Europe’s Jewish communities that is invoked to confirm a kind of retrospective historico-moral judgment on their members. Because they did not flee in time, because many of the Jews who perished in the death camps clung, until it was too late, to a faith that the process of civilization and social enlightenment was irreversible and would remain strong enough to guarantee their physical safety, it has become a commonplace to pathologize their hopes as merely willful delusions or symptoms of abject self-hatred. Such judgments, proclaimed in tones that E. P. Thompson, in a different context, memorably characterized as “the enormous condescension of posterity,” ⁵ are marked at the formal level by a process that I have called backshadowing. ⁶ Backshadowing endows the past with the coherence of an inevitable and linear unfolding; it works by a kind of retroactive foreshadowing in which the shared knowledge of the outcome of a series of events by narrator and listener is used to judge the participants in those events as though they too should have known what was to come. Thus, our knowledge of the Shoah is used to condemn the “blindness” and “self-deception” of all those who did not actively strive to save themselves from a doom that was supposedly both clearly visible and...