Conflagrations, Expirations: The Jews and the Holocaust in the Works of Aleksandar Tišma

Tiefin der Zeitenschrunde,beim Wabeneiswartet, ein Atemkristall,dein unumstößlichesZeugnis.

Deepin the timecrevasse,in the honeycomb-icewaits a breathcrystal,your unalterabletestimony.

Paul Celan, Die Atemwende/The Breathturn (1967)

A much interpreted, and often criticized, statement by Theodor Adorno claims that, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”¹ Without entering into the long-standing debate about this assertion, one can retain from it at least that the event denominated, often rightly or wrongly by the single name of “Auschwitz”—the Holocaust of European Jewry—has brought about a singular crisis of representation and impossibility to write “poetry” or, to generalize, “literature,” after this event. Or, more precisely, this event marks an irreversible caesura (Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s thesis), after which there is an impossibility of writing and reading literature in the manner done up to that point.² This impossibility is countered by an immense ethical demand to testify about the event, which, as many have argued, defies any representation, testimony, and even language itself. After Auschwitz, literature is facing this impossible demand, formulated by Maurice Blanchot in The Writing of Disaster: “We read books on Auschwitz. The wish of all, in the camps, the last wish: know what has happened, do not forget, and at the same time never will you know.”³

Indeed, in his essay “Forbidden Representation” from his volume The Ground of the Image, Jean-Luc Nancy asserts, “the Shoah is the ultimate crisis of representation.”⁴

The incommensurable number of deaths multiplied in the millions, of which no witness or survivor was allowed by the Final Solution, the technical reproduction that reached industrial proportions (thus affecting the modes of representation of the catastrophe) traversed the bodies sent to die in multiplicity and massification that both defy imagination, one’s ability to speak about this event, or represent it. A breathtaking task:

How is it possible to speak, when you feel a “frenzied desire” to perform an impossible task—to convey the experience just as it was, to explain everything to the other, when you are seized by a veritable delirium of words—and yet, at the same time, it is impossible for you to speak. Impossible, without choking.⁵

The holocaustic pyre singed not only the millions obliterated in this manner, but the very core of European cultures, the West, and its various ethics of monotheism. For example, in his Moses and Monotheism, anticipating the Holocaust, Freud called the Nazis “those badly christened.”⁶ The traditions of mimetic representation, including the representation of the experience of what it means to die as a singular human being and the experience of transcendence related to it, have been turbulently affected by the Holocaust as well.

As Walter Benjamin wrote in “Some Reflections on Kafka,” also anticipating the Holocaust and defying Heidegger’s notion of death as what is most proper to Dasein, an experience subsequently made impossible in the camps, in Kafka’s world we all experience what it means to die, however not as singular human beings, not as individuals, but in masses.⁷ The SS, with its symbol an empty skull (die SS Totenkofverbände), engaged in the production of death in immense multiplications, stealing the very “property” of death from those condemned to die, and exhausted or have “forbidden” the very possibility of representation: the immanence of massified deaths without transcendence opens up a black hole in the symbolic, in language, silencing it. But in the very same breath, it has created an imperative and responsibility to testify about it. While the agonies of the dying ones were real and each death irreplaceable, a singular disappearance of the entire world, the death multiplied in the millions undermined and made impossible the very notion of dying “proper” to each individual that could be represented or testified to in a way singular and “authentic,” death from then on forever imminent and in deferral at once.⁸ No one, as Celan famously wrote, can testify for the witness, “niemand Zeugt für den Zeugen.” But testify we must...