The End of the Holocaust (review)

Alvin Rosenfeld’s The End of the Holocaust is a uniquely important work by one of the founding figures in the field of Holocaust literary studies. From his 1980 classic A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature, which was one of the earliest comprehensive studies of Holocaust writing, through other major works such as Imagining Hitler (1985) and his two edited essay collections Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel (1978; co-edited with Irving Greenberg) and Thinking about the Holocaust after Half a Century (1997), Rosenfeld’s publications have focused scholarly attention on the events of the Nazi genocide against the Jews as those events have been communicated through literary and other kinds of non-historical or journalistic texts, such as diaries and testimony. In doing so Rosenfeld deals not only with what he labels the “problematics” of Holocaust writing, but also with the equally problematic echoes and reverberations of the Holocaust as the events of the Second World War enter into relations with other social, political, philosophical, and theological agendas. How, Rosenfeld asks in A Double Dying, can a writer, whether of fiction, poetry, drama, or memoir, represent a series of events as inherently resistant to representation as the hideous torture and mass murder of millions of human beings, primary among them European Jews? How can a written text convey the magnitude and sheer horror of the events that occurred in the death camps and in the ghettos? As Rosenfeld puts the case in A Double Dying, quoting Elie Wiesel, “at Auschwitz, not only man died but also the idea of man” (5). Hence Rosenfeld’s title: A Double Dying. The corpus of Holocaust literature, Rosenfeld cogently argues, cannot be defined simply by a shared subject. Rather, such a body of texts must convey the force of that double dying. It must compel us to fundamental changes in our modes of perception and expression. Following the atrocities of the camps, humanistic expressions of culture, such as literature and the arts, cannot remain unaltered.

Now, some thirty years after the publication of this major originating study of Holocaust writing, Rosenfeld examines some of the transformations that have occurred in the ways the Holocaust is represented today in written and visual texts. What he discovers is that many of the concerns of major Holocaust writers such as Primo Levi and Jean Améry, whom he discusses in the book vis-à-vis their fears for the abuse and misuses of the Holocaust subject, have indeed come to pass: the horror and the uniquely Jewish aspects of the Holocaust — which, however many non-Jewish victims were also sacrificed to the Nazi agenda, nonetheless was defined specifically as an assault against the Jews — is fast fading from memory. Some of the central questions the Holocaust seemed to pose are also dissolving with it, such as the question (to cite Primo Levi here) of what a human being is. Instead of deeply tormenting investigations of Elie Wiesel’s “double dying,” a more hopeful interpretation of the events of the Holocaust has begun to emerge, along with a tendency toward universalizing its significance away from its particularly Jewish character. The Holocaust, as Rosenfeld tells the story of its recent currency in contemporary culture (primarily in America, but elsewhere as well), has become something of a trope for genocide in particular and human (and sometimes non-human) suffering in general. In its capacity as a trope it has also invited a significant measure of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionistic backlash, as the Nazi assault against the Jews has entered into a competition between and among histories of human catastrophes. This latter phenomenon has become especially severe in relation to contemporary Middle East politics, the Jewish victims of the Holocaust becoming, in some discourses, the new Nazi victimizers of a new victim class, the Palestinians, who metamorphose into the Jews in this contemporary allegorical replay of the Holocaust.

As Rosenfeld points out in the first chapter of The End of the Holocaust, “it is not primarily from the work of...