Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust

Introduction: Representations of the Holocaust and the End of Memory

In spite of Adorno’s dictum of over forty years ago that to make art from the suffering of the Holocaust is barbarity, the event of the Holocaust can be and has been effectively represented. Even if Lawrence Langer had not pointed this fact out in 1976, the proliferation of novels, plays, films, and other representations of the event seems to have mooted Adorno’s point altogether, though the fact of that proliferation also raises serious questions about the culture industry’s prurience. But we wonder whether a more complicated and troubling facet of Adorno’s point has been missed altogether: while it is true that representations of the event, and scholarly work on those representations, have experienced something of a boom in the last decade, it is unclear to what extent those representations—and the academic industry that has grown up around them—provide a knowledge of the Shoah, and to what extent they provide (or perhaps better, present) something other than knowledge, something akin to a flash of horror that precedes and disturbs our ability to know, the barbarism that Adorno concludes must be the ultimate poetic object after Auschwitz. So he may have been right after all: the demand to know and to remember the events may well 3 Introduction Representations of the Holocaust and the End of Memory michael bernard-donals and richard glejzer simply replicate the rationality of the Final Solution, if that demand translates to the will to knowledge, whereby each representation is ultimately reduced to a moral imperative or to the need to square memories of the survivors—what they saw—with history. Dori Laub makes just this point about witness testimony in the face of the historian’s demand for authenticity. He gives us the testimony of a woman bearing witness to the short-lived uprising in Auschwitz in which she remembers seeing four crematoria exploding in flames, and the subsequent reaction by historians after viewing her testimony. That reaction was dismissive: what she says is completely flawed, since we know that only one of the crematoria was destroyed, not four; “Since the memory of the testifying woman turned out to be, in this way, fallible , one could not accept—nor give credence to—her whole account of the events. It was utterly important to remain accurate, lest the revisionist in history discredit everything.”1 Further, Laub reports one particular reaction: “‘Don’t you see,’ one historian passionately exclaimed, ‘that the woman’s eyewitness account of the uprising that took place at Auschwitz is hopelessly misleading in its incompleteness? She had no idea what was going on. She ascribes importance to an attempt that, historically , made no difference.’”2 But Laub sees something in this woman’s testimony that the historians do not, something that the focus of squaring what she reports with a historical record ultimately occludes. For Laub, what was important was not the number of chimneys that exploded but rather the way in which the witness enacted the memory, the way her testimony resists the silence that Auschwitz itself attempted to enact: “The woman’s testimony, on the other hand, is breaking the frame of the concentration camp by and through her very testimony: she is breaking out of Auschwitz even by her very talking. She had come, indeed, to testify, not to the empirical number of the chimneys, but to resistance, to the affirmation of survival, to the breakage of the frame of death.”3 Laub concludes that there is a more important—and indeed more authentic—knowledge at work in this particular testimony , a knowledge that is passed over in the attempt at historical authenticity . It is this woman’s experience of resistance and survival that is the ultimate object of her bearing witness. The survivor’s testimony and the reactions to it show what happens when one joins questions of representation to questions of history, questions of accuracy to questions of authenticity. And yet while the testimony is at the very least problematically connected to the event it purports to narrate, it is transmitted 4 bernard-donals & glejzer (horror; fascination; an act of witnessing) just as in other contemporary representations of the Holocaust. The question that must be asked is just what is being presented, whether what the writer witnesses and writes and what the reader sees in testimony amount to the same thing. It is not only the question of authenticity that...