Witness without End?

In Norma Rosen's Touching Evil (1969), one of the strangest Holocaust novels on record, two American women, one pregnant and the other preoccupied with her own fertility, neither of them Jewish, watch the televised trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Each identifies obsessively with the testimony of survivor witnesses brought forth in Jerusalem to name the crimes of the Nazi regime. The narrator, Jean, identifies with a "corpse-digger" (43) who clawed her way to freedom from within a pile of dead bodies, while the pregnant woman, Hattie, identifies with a survivor who gave birth in the "typhus-infested straw" of an unnamed death camp (131). As Hattie "sucks up the images" of the Eichmann trial, her companion imagines the unborn child "slipping out, all pale and amniotized, to get a better look at the screen, then slipping back in again" (68). In Jean's fantasy Hattie "bears the fetus that bears witness to the witness on TV who is bearing witness at the trial" (68).

This passage is one of several that foregrounds Rosen's prescient dramatization of the ways in which "identification" and "witnessing," with their attendant problems of corrosion, voyeurism, projection, replication, and the like, were bound to become key themes in Holocaust studies in years to come—prescient not least because "Holocaust studies" barely existed at the time Rosen wrote her novel, while "the Holocaust," as a term of art, so to speak, barely existed at the time her novel is set. Not only that, but in the scene in question, Jean, a woman in her late thirties, is called back in memory to her own introduction to the Nazi genocide in 1944, when her college psychology teacher, who deals in symbolically freighted experiments with mice in mazes, shows Jean newly revealed photographs of the liberated death camps—"experimental cell blocks . . . piled-up stick bodies at the bottom of a lime-pit"—and then takes her virginity (72). "Only joy can cancel out that horror," he professes afterward (73). "I seduced you with dirty pictures". However this experience marks Jean's subsequent "witness" to the Holocaust and launches one strand of the novel's overdetermined argument about post-Holocaust "reproduction," Rosen confronts us with the disturbing probability that the atrocities of the Judeocide are seductive, a kind of pornography through which we lose our innocence, whatever the motive or epiphany, time and again.

Contemporary critics, including a number in the cohort under review, rightly depict cultural productions of the late 1970s—specifically, the television miniseries Holocaust in 1978 and the establishment of a commission to plan the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1979—as propulsive events in the Americanization, and hence the universalization, of Holocaust "memory." Even so, Rosen's focus on the Eichmann trial is telling. She was responsive not just to the pivotal role the trial played, by most accounts, in breaking the postwar "silence" about the Holocaust, but also to the redundancy of witnessing upon which our understanding of it would come to be predicated as true witnesses, whether victims, perpetrators, or bystanders, were replaced, generation by generation, by those who witness only through acts of representation.

Insofar as it marked the convergence of global media coverage and pronouncements about the "lessons" of the Holocaust, the Eichmann trial was also a key marker, argue Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider in The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (2006), in the "de-territorialization of [Holocaust] memory," a process that unfolded in coming decades significantly in English and through American media (108). Whereas English must at first have seemed inconsequential within the mélange of languages through which the Holocaust was experienced and subsequently remembered, its very exteriority also meant it had avoided the corrupting power of Nazism. "Lodged at the corners of the globe, rather than in the midst of Europe," as Alan Rosen writes in Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism, and the Problem of English (2005), English "escaped contamination" (189). As the language of liberation, moreover, and soon the foremost language of technology, capitalism, and democracy, English was an inevitable vehicle of Americanization in two senses—making the Holocaust...