Disappearing Traces: Holocaust Testimonials, Ethics, and Aesthetics

Introduction: Disappearing Traces: Holocaust Testimonials between Ethics and Aesthetics

1 Introduction Disappearing Traces: Holocaust Testimonials between Ethics and Aesthetics It is not an event. It is not an event. It is something horrible. —h e l e n a jo c k e l , a Holocaust survivor The truth doesn’t kill the possibility of art. —s h o s h a n a f e l m a n , “The Return of the Voice” During the ceremonies inaugurating the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Center in 2003, Aba Beer, a Holocaust survivor, was asked to reminisce about his experiences during the war. At a loss for words as to how to describe the horrors he had undergone, he remarked, “It takes a poet to describe it. I don’t have the words” (MacAfee, 2003). What does it mean when an eyewitness to the events, on whom we rely absolutely for knowledge about the past, summons the imaginary powers of a poet to convey the truth about his Holocaust ordeal ? When Beer admits his linguistic powerlessness vis-à-vis the experience he has tried—and failed—to describe, his plea that a poet come to his aid is underwritten by the ethical imperative (Remember !). Beer’s remark thus reveals a paradox inherent in the majority of Holocaust testimonies: the obligation to remember, which derives its ethical force from the horror of the victims’ experiences, requires aesthetic prowess and the imaginative tools of a poet so it can be carried out. This conflict between the ethical imperative to remember the catastrophic past and the iconoclastic impetus of art called upon to convey that memory is even more pronounced in literary and artistic works about the Holocaust, as Theodor Adorno already knew when he proclaimed , in 1949, an injunction against “writing poetry after Auschwitz .”1 As I argue throughout this book, Holocaust testimonials Introduction 2 provide a locus where received notions of ethics and aesthetics, their foundational categories and concepts, and traditional distinctions between their proper domains are continuously contested and transformed . The goal, then, is not to find out what constitutes ethically responsible representations, as opposed to irreverent, merely aesthetic productions. In the last two decades, such distinctions have become increasingly fluid, as witnessed in discussions about Art Spiegelman’s comic book Maus, Binjamin Wilkomirski alias Bruno Doesseker’s fake Holocaust memoir Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1995),2 Norman Finkelstein’s polemical study The Holocaust Industry (2000),3 Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning film Life Is Beautiful (1997), Peter Eisenmann’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (inaugurated in 2005), the exhibition Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art at the Jewish Museum in New York (2001),4 Quentin Tarantino’s revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds (2009), and other contentious Holocaust productions. Instead, the book explores an aporetic relation between ethics and aesthetics in works about the Holocaust, revealing this tension to be a fundamental component of the labor of memory, the task of which is to bring the traumatic past into the fold of the present and carry it toward the future. This constitutive tension between ethical and aesthetic imperatives animates the search for new means of expressing their intertwined , yet contradictory, claims. The resulting new literary and artistic idioms come to the aid of the Holocaust survivor as well as his listeners—potential future rememberers, whom his words, aided by “a poet,” bring into existence. In works of literature and art, these new languages of testimony make it possible for us to describe, to understand , to imagine, and to remember. Beer’s remark also draws attention to a relatively recent shift in the dominant modalities of representing traumatic history. As French historian Annette Wieviorka noted in 1998, although literature and art initially were considered inferior to historical research and documentation , and inadequate to the task of depicting atrocities, increasingly they became accepted as legitimate forms of testimony. As Ernst van Alphen (1997) writes in his study of Holocaust art, “Whereas the education I received failed to make the event of the Holocaust a meaningful event to me, Holocaust literature and art finally succeeded in calling my attention to this apocalyptic moment in human history” (3). The elevation, and even privileging, of imaginative representations as forms of engagement with the past allows us to interpret them as Introduction 3 memory sites in their own right. They can even be considered unique because of their capacity for conveying the mnesic trace of that which falls outside traditional techniques...