Representing the Unimaginable: Narratives of Disaster (review)

The focus of this excellent collection is, as the editors Angela Stock and Cornelia Stott state, the " 'unrepresentability' of the experience of a disaster and the textuality of the represented event—and thus also the contradictions, ruptures, and silences inevitably created by the tensions between 'reality' and 'representation' " (5). Literary critics, historians, sociologists, and philosophers from Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and Belgium are the contributors to this volume. In their lucid introduction the editors argue that silence is not a viable option for coming to terms with the loss and trauma disasters leave behind. What cannot be expressed will be forgotten or will resurface and haunt us later. Finding words and images to communicate the unimaginable "is both a psychological necessity and moral duty" (10). The editors espouse a constructivist view of language when they pinpoint two fundamental corollaries in regard to the representation of disasters. First, the experiences and descriptions are embedded in a tradition of "well-known textual or visual representations of previous disasters" (11). Second, words do not simply represent events but distort and appropriate them to the dictates of ingrained ideologies, conventions, and strategies.

These points are clearly demonstrated in Ole Peter Grell's examination of early modern ways of making sense of natural disasters. In 17^th-century England flooding and conflagrations were exclusively interpreted through the authoritative lens of the Old and New Testament. Grell links the traditional faith in a higher authority to our current trust in scientists or medical specialists to find a "remedy or solution" which might save us from future calamities (25). The longevity of the moral-theological interpretation of natural disasters is exemplified in Thelma Wills Foote's analysis of Audre Lorde's poem "Afterimages." When the Mississippi town of Jackson—the site of the gruesome 1955 lynching of the black boy Emmett Till—is hit by a devastating flood in 1979, Lorde is unable to sympathize with the white flood victims, since they had no sympathy for the suffering of the "excluded Other." In her frustration Lorde perceives the flood as "an act of cosmic vengeance, the arrival of Judgment Day" (139). Unfortunately, Foote links the coincidence between the flooding and murder in a rather unreflective manner with the Freudian concept of the uncanny.

The controversies surrounding the commemoration and representation of the man-made disaster of the 20^th century, the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany, are prominently featured in this volume. Hugh Smith and J. John Lennon shed light on the "notorious history" of the fortress town Terezin (Theresienstadt) following the German occupation of the Czech lands (68). Only after the "Velvet Revolution" in 1989 was it possible to open a museum showcasing the town's infamous Jewish Ghetto liberated by Soviet troops in 1945. Under communism the "annihilation of the Jewish prisoners and others did not sit easily with simplistic explanations of class struggles against international fascism or the heroic tales of the communist resistance" (69). Due to the preservation of the former concentration camp buildings and the Gestapo prison, Terezin has turned into a major tourist attraction, capable of sustaining long-term public interest. The authors poignantly contrast the success of Terezin with the underdeveloped memorial site of the Lety camp in Southern Bohemia, which during World War II held approximately 1300 Roma captive. Evidently the limited investment by the current Czech government signifies a lack of concern about the persecution and loss the Roma and Sinti peoples endured.

In her article "There's no business like Shoah business," Gwyneth Bodger elaborates further on the commodification of the Holocaust in popular culture. Her prime example is Steven Spielberg's movie Schindler's List, which captivated a worldwide audience and became a huge commercial success. At the same time the actual events of the Holocaust had to be rewritten "in a form that is both accessible and relevant today" (109). Rather naively, Spielberg's narrative invokes the optimistic message that even during the darkest period...