Cadaverland: Inventing a Pathology of Catastrophe for Holocaust Survival [The Limits of Medical Knowledge and Historical Memory in France]

Figure 5: Dilemma

175 As we have just seen, the survivor was figured entirely through the perspective of the Holocaust. But except for its lasting psychic consequences, the Holocaust itself, and in the main the extermination of European Jewry, had ended. “It” had happened, and a new world emerged after 1945, in which as Zygmunt Bauman remarked, holocausts were no longer impossible, and future holocausts indeed possible (2000, 3). What were some of the implications, both at the time and subsequently, that derived from now living in a post-Holocaust world? Perhaps one of the best known implications was Theodor W. Adorno’s famed pronunciamento in 1949 that, after Auschwitz, writing poetry was “barbaric.”1 That the remark was often misunderstood, taken overly literally , and promptly expanded into a literal impossibility, along with other acts such as belief, thanks, or prayer, is beside the point. Some words, once released, take on a life of their own. The tendency of certain words to become inflated with other meanings is our dilemma in this chapter, through a discussion of four interconnected topics in the field of Holocaust affect —trauma; memory, re-membering (as in trying to put back together); commemoration (collective remembering); and, writing as always at the same time a form of rewriting, as a result of which that being written about is constantly also being transformed. A statement of a problem followed by particularization of the alternatives richard a. lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. fi g u r e 5 dilemma C a d a v e r l a n d 176 Trauma andTraumato-Culture, 1945–1990 Recall from the previous chapter, that postwar French psychiatry had been “tonified” by the work of John R. Rees, chief psychiatric consultant to the British Army, who saw useful postwar civilian applications of the lessons learned by military psychiatry during World War II, lessons that had also impressed the thirty-year-old Jacques Lacan in what they seemed to offer for the psychic recovery of a traumatized and demoralized France. The French military psychiatric literature of the 1946 to 1949 period was marked by certain conjunctural specificities, notably a number of papers on “the psychopathology of betrayal,” here especially related to the high levels of the denunciation of civilians that characterized the Occupation years. Other scientific papers from a comparative perspective examined the different psychiatric states of pows, political deportees, and “voluntary” workers employed in Germany. In the discussion following a paper on “the mental sequelae of captivity,” Eugène Minkowski remarked—as usual with finesse—that sequelae, because they could extend to the population as a whole under Occupation or war conditions, only further added to the adaptation difficulties of the returning pow or deportee, coming back to a society that collectively was tired and given to manifestations of irritability and passivity (Minkowski 1948). Various French psychiatrists demonstrated considerable creativity in attempting to classify the mental states of “captivity”: for instance, to mention only two, “barbed-wire psychosis” among former pows, and “mania of the return” (“manie du retour”) as part of the reactive psychic states that followed the Liberation of France and the mass prisoner repatriation.2 Above all, the attempts to classify the varied states of nervous tension, anxiety, psychoses, manias, and so forth manifested a more general collective anxiety affecting French postwar society as a whole. This interpretation also emerged from two scientific papers presented in the immediate postwar period. One by Charlin emphasized that, apart from the work of Jean Cazeneuve (see chapter 2), practically the only studies on the psychoses of the 1939 to 1945 war were “those by the Anglo-Saxons,” leaving the French field wide open to new perspectives (Charlin 1949). A good example of such new perspectives was a 1946 paper by Mauryey Bornsztayn, a Polish Jewish psychiatrist, still alive in Lodz, who presented it at a French conference, remarking that, as the Occupation had interrupted his clinical work, this gave him an occasion to think more generally about the postwar future of psychiatry. For Bornsztayn, the overall Di l e mm a 177 F i g u r e 5 tendency of scientific work in general was toward broader and broader generalizations . Comparison with other branches of science proved not very flattering for psychiatry, which up to now had contented itself with being merely a descriptive science. The war, Bornsztayn argued, had changed the overall climate for psychiatry, making it...