Using and Abusing the Holocaust (review)

As the capstone of a New York afternoon many years ago I spent several hours digging around the dusty second-hand Jewish Studies shelves of the Strand bookstore in the Village. Among the treasures I acquired that day was Lawrence Langer’s first major contribution, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (1975). This text has had an enduring influence on my work. When it was published, the world of literary and artistic Holocaust scholarship, now so large, was miniscule; Langer thus helped to launch what has subsequently become a blossoming and fascinating field of Holocaust representation. Since this pioneering text Langer has written several books on the Holocaust, including the much cited Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (1991), Admitting The Holocaust (1995), and Preempting the Holocaust (1998). Consistently writing with grace and emotion, Langer has discussed the process of surviving, how survivors cope with difficult memories, how to represent the Holocaust, and how subsequent generations of writers and other artists struggle with traumatic inheritance. In his latest work, Using and Abusing the Holocaust, Langer develops what he calls deathlife, or the “neglected” idea that what we might want to find as a triumph of the human spirit in the face of evil, is often, for survivors, a struggle between the life they have randomly been given after the camps and the death that surrounded them in the camps and now haunts their dreams and memories. Langer argues that “the sensation of being dead while alive reflects a dual thrust of their [i.e., survivors’] present being: in chronological time they seek their future while in durational time, those isolated moments of dreadful memories do not dissipate but congeal into dense claws of tenacious consciousness. A lethal past relentlessly pursues them” (p. 2).

Langer studies the relationship between art and deathlife, finding that “artistic expression . . . makes available to the imagination a dimension of Holocaust atrocity that few other kinds of writing can achieve” (p. 77). While Langer uses the term “aching beauty” (p. 81) to describe some Holocaust art, he is often ambiguous about this central theme in his most recent work; this ambiguity can be gleaned through such phrases as “art signals its limited success through ultimate failure” (p. 81). Whereas Langer wants to celebrate the beauty of some Holocaust art, to note the ways the beautiful negotiates the divide between death and life, he also seems, at moments like these, to hold back from his own assertions about what artistic expression can achieve.

In Using and Abusing the Holocaust Langer discusses deathlife, the not-always- so-successful triumph of the human spirit, and the possibility of beautiful art about the Holocaust through a series of case studies that include readings of Charlotte Delbo and Jorge Semprun, Anne Frank, Life is Beautiful, the Wilkomirski scandal, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the diaries of Viktor Klemperer, important theorists such as James Young and Michael Rothberg, and the art of Samuel Bak. In what may become one of the most controversial sections of the book, Langer punctures the sentimentality and “mindless overspeak” (p. 24) that “clings like a burr” (p. 23) to the discourse around Anne Frank. Daringly, Langer asks us to move on from Anne Frank and to recognize that this teenager’s diary, focusing on the years in hiding in Amsterdam before she was deported and died in a concentration camp, has achieved such extreme global popularity precisely because it is not about the Holocaust, because it does not teach us about the horrors of the camps. Langer finds that those who claim, as one New York Times book reviewer did, that Frank’s diary is “the single most compelling personal account of the Holocaust” (p. 24), abuse the diary and overlook other Holocaust texts. Langer is not shy of controversy, and his argument that we should “abandon it [i.e., The Diary of Anne Frank] and turn to more adult fare” (p. 27) will surely have its detractors; but as Langer notes of Rothberg’s fine...