Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust

12. Teaching (after) Auschwitz: Pedagogy between Redemption and Sublimity

We begin by asking a simple question: what do we think we teach when we write about, or give classes on, the Shoah? In the years since 1945 we have heard a lot of answers: so that we never forget; so that something like this could never happen again; so that we can heal or redeem the damage done to the world through anti-Semitism or racial hatred or any number of other symptoms of genocide. We would like to suggest that although these answers, and others like them—answers that focus our attention on knowing or understanding the events of the Holocaust and its broad ethical consequences—are compelling and useful, they are nevertheless wrong. They are wrong for two important and connected reasons. The first is that what we have come to understand as knowledge and learning do not so much provide access to an event as they occlude access to it by allowing us to believe that the event—or any object of knowledge for that matter, but certainly this particular event—can be retrieved. The second is that the objects through which we do have access to the event—testimony, documentary evidence, museums and memorials, poetry and fiction—are representations of a traumatic, sublime object that are themselves resistant to knowledge. 245 12 Teaching (after) Auschwitz Pedagogy between Redemption and Sublimity michael bernard-donals and richard glejzer Let us take as an example the fifty-year-old response to the question of why we should teach or write about the Shoah: to remember, so that it will never happen again. One rendering of this response is in terms of redemption: we study and read about the Holocaust so that we, or history , or Judaism, or the lives or memories of the lives of the six million, may be redeemed. This is the response by Irving Greenberg and Emil Fackenheim, the latter of whom went so far as to claim that we must add a 614th commandment that takes the form of an imperative not to grant Hitler a posthumous victory: to survive as Jews, to remember the horrors perpetrated upon the victims. Greenberg’s dictum is to incorporate the pain of the victims and survivors into the hope that leads to the rebuilding of a better, more humane world. Both Fackenheim’s and Greenberg’s responses rest on the notion that it is possible not only to remember the events of the Holocaust but also to establish upon that memory the dreary and yet glorious work of rebuilding a sound Jewish community. From the ashes of destruction rises a new people. In this rendering, the Shoah and the Final Solution become objects of knowledge from which we can learn, objects of knowledge that, if viewed appropriately , will teach us how to act differently under similar circumstances by recognizing the logic or the elements that lead to genocide. However, the Holocaust as an event complicates this notion of redemption resting within historical knowledge. The events that comprise the Holocaust, inasmuch as they compel people to learn about and to teach the circumstances that produced the events, are too fragmented to know, let alone teach, ultimately depending on the knowledge one already has in order to give it shape and coherence. In part this is due to the difficulty in having access to documentary evidence of the Shoah itself . One of the reasons Holocaust deniers have been as effective as they are is that the German government, during the closing months of the war, was successful in destroying many of the records they so systematically kept of the Final Solution. Himmler’s assertion that the Final Solution was the never-written and never-to-be-written page of glory in SS history has been borne out not by Germany’s success in hiding the annihilation from its citizens but, more importantly for us now, by the fact that the remaining records of the annihilation have been spread to archives and to attics all around the world. (And even in archives they are unavailable: Yad Vashem still has a significant portion of its archives untranslated and unavailable in boxes in warehouses.) How do you know that which cannot even be retrieved? 246 bernard-donals & glejzer More importantly, though, history itself resists retrieval, not because the records are sketchy but because history itself is not inherently redemptive, redeemable, or knowable. This was the point that got...