After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture ed. by R. Clifton Spargo, and Robert M. Ehrenreich (review)

After Representation?, which deals with many familiar areas of Holocaust Studies, including memory, trauma, and the limitations of language, was inspired by a 2001 Symposium on Literature and the Holocaust organized by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (ix, x). Edited by Clifton S. Spargo, an Associate Professor of English at Marquette University, and Robert M. Ehrenreich, the Director of University Programs at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the book is a collection of eleven essays in which the authors explore how the aforementioned ideas contribute to the “contemporary state of the field” (x). As Spargo notes in the Introduction, “On the Cultural Continuities of Literary Representation,” in each of the text’s three sections, the authors “examine how writers—whether they write as witnesses to the Holocaust or at an imaginative distance from it—articulate the shadowy borderline between fact and fiction, between event and expression, between the condition of bare life endured in atrocity and the hope of a meaningful existence” (3-4). As such, when read together, the articles in these sections draw attention to the ways in which historical representation is “culturally mediated” and to the complex relationship between writing, history, and ethics (7).

The first section of After Representation, “Is the Holocaust Still to be Written?” consists of four articles, “The Holocaust, History Writing, and the Role of Fiction” by Geoffrey Hartman, “Nostalgia and the Holocaust” by Sara R. Horowitz, “Death in Language: From Mado’s Mourning to the Act of Writing” by Petra Schweitzer, and “Oskar Rosenfeld and Historiographic Realism (including Sex, Shit, and Status)” by Berel Lang. In each of these essays, Spargo notes that the authors examine the “competing imperatives operative in Holocaust writing—the pull between a language of radical discontinuity (e.g., the trauma as persistent interruption) and a language that supposes the necessity of continuity (drawing upon tradition, nostalgic memory, and the resources of communal identity)” (x-xi). Hartmann evaluates many of the tensions implicit in the relationship between fiction and history, and the role of writing within this construct, while Horowitz focuses on Eva Hoffmann’s Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language and the work of Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer in order to introduce the layers of nostalgia in post-Holocaust family relationships, identity construction, and the search for home (33, 36, 41, 47, 45, 53, 50, 52). Within the context of trauma theory, Schweitzer examines Charlotte Delbo’s treatment of the story of Mado, an inmate who perished in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and, drawing on the work of Hayden White, Lang explores Rosenfeld’s “ghetto writing,” and assesses the limitations of realism by examining what Rosenfeld included and excluded from his text (59, 75, 76, 83). By examining how Holocaust writing operates in different cultural contexts and time periods, these four authors explore the ways in which writing has be used to record, reconstruct, and re-imagine the past, while drawing attention to the ambiguities of language, the constraints of genres, and the silences imposed by trauma and the passage of time.

Section two, “A Question for Aesthetics?” contains three articles, “Nazi Aesthetics in Historical Context” by James E. Young, “Writing Ruins: The Anachronistic Aesthetics of André Schwarz-Bart” by Michael Rothberg, and “‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem’: The Poetry of Forgetful Memory in Israel and Palestine” by Michael Bernard-Donals. In these essays, the authors assess “how important the medium of textual witness or imaginative documentation is to what it conveys” (xi). Young explores the relationship between power is visual representation through his examination of various forums for Nazi aesthetics, from political rallies to The Triumph of the Will, and, in his comparative examination of Schwarz-Bart’s A Woman Named Solitude and The Last of the Just, Rothberg explores “the commonalities and divergences of Holocaust and postcolonial literature” (97, 94, 91, 99). Finally, Bernard...