Search Results (21)

As first-hand testimonies and accounts of the Holocaust fade, scholars and artists alike have struggled to depict and contextualize the genocide’s monumental violence. But depicting violence and its aftermath poses several problems, including the question of how to recall loss without artificially filling in or effacing the absence so central to its understanding. In essence, remembering the Holocaust is a paradox: the preservation of an absence. Marianne Hirsch’s influential concept of postmemory addresses this paradox and asks questions about memorial capacity in the twenty-first century. This essay considers Hirsch’s postmemory in the context of W.G. Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz, which uses a combination of prose and photography to engage the difficulties inherent in memory work without access to eyewitnesses. Through the interaction of printed text and images, Austerlitz subtly references Lurianic mysticism’s concept of tikkun and Tree of Life (ilanot) diagrams. The result is a depiction of memory that is both process-based and embodies absence. My reading of Austerlitz traces a Jewish heritage within the work of a non-Jewish German author by attending to a tradition of mystical thought embedded in the novel. This situates Sebald’s fiction in a much longer Jewish history that stretches out on either end of the event of the Holocaust. Structurally, Sebald develops a tikkun-like process of (re)creation which relies on gathering material scraps of the past and imaginatively engaging with their absences in the present. Images, just as much as text, are central to this process. Reading Austerlitz in the context of Kabbalah reveals an intellectual and artistic link to a Jewish history that, while predating the Holocaust, nonetheless sheds light on post-Holocaust memories of loss. Full article

This article analyzes Jean-Claude Grumberg’s 2019 Holocaust fairy tale, The Most Precious of Cargoes, translated from French. This fairy tale adds to Grumberg’s oeuvre of Holocaust fiction, including plays and children’s stories. His fairy tale may be his most personal attempt to process his own Holocaust experience, as he includes an appendix with facts about his father and grandfather who died in Auschwitz. Specifically, the fairy tale is approached through an analysis of the fairy tale genre’s pairing with the subject of the Holocaust. The article also examines possible readings of such a pairing through a close reading of the tale that analyzes the role of good vs. evil. Published interviews with Grumberg, theory on the fairy tale, and other Holocaust fairy tales establish a view that The Most Precious of Cargoes is unique in Holocaust fiction. Full article

This article considers the various ways in which the topographies of Auschwitz are used as a symbolic means of articulating particular kinds of guilt in fiction relating to the Holocaust. To do this, I analyse three primary examples: John Donoghue’s The Death’s Head Chess Club (2015), Martin Amis’ The Zone of Interest (2014), and Dalton Trumbo’s unfinished novel, Night of the Aurochs (1979). These texts, I argue, employ the complex spatial dynamics of the site in order to address important questions of power, agency, and moral ambiguity. More specifically, such imagery reveals a spectrum of complicity that, without exonerating those responsible for the genocide, suggests the need for a more nuanced understanding of the Holocaust and those that were responsible for its implementation. Full article

In the Israeli collective memory, the Yom Kippur’s battles in the Golan Heights have become synonymous with a long lasting national scar that fails to disappear. Interestingly, until the release of Yaron Zilberman’s recent television series Valley of Tears (She’at Ne’Ila, 2020), this war, which was traditionally associated with the pictured northern landscape, had appeared in few documentaries, but was almost absent from Israeli feature films. This article analyzes one of the very few attempts to deal with this memory, Ari Folman’s feature film Made in Israel (2001). Using a science fiction narrative structure, Folman adopts historian Anita Shapira’s contention about the link between this war and the Holocaust, because both confronted the Jewish people with its fear of extermination. His narrative invites the viewer to participate imaginatively in a road movie set against the snow-covered landscapes of the Golan Heights, where a number of hitmen attempt to catch the last surviving Nazi and bring him to trial in Jerusalem. Interestingly, what begins as a Zionist mission in the hegemonic spaces of the State of Israel gradually transforms into various European landscapes as the snow piles up and the Nazi feels increasingly at home. Full article

Taking the next step in our understanding of the testimony of Holocaust literature involves taking a step back to recuperate a theoretical approach that does not cede all human attempts at knowledge to skepticism. At odds with Theodor Adorno about the possibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz, Adler, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, transformed his experiences into fiction. In his novel, Eine Reise, published in 1962, and in his 1965 essay on “Die Grenzen des Sagbaren,” or the limits of the sayable, Adler addresses these dilemmas. While Adorno collapses traditions of value into barbarity, Adler struggles to maintain, describe and explain the possibility of human resistance to evil. I examine Adler’s nuanced use of language in these two works and show that the rage and epistemological uncertainty that dominate the post-Holocaust world do not necessarily lead to the destruction of all traditional forms of meaning. Full article

This article accounts for what language and memory are and are not capable of in literary depictions of the Holocaust. To read, analyze, or even write Holocaust narratives, readers must expect to encounter new forms of writing and expression. This interpretation of Ida Fink’s A Scrap of Time effectively inverts the paradox of ‘telling’ the unspeakable by giving voice to an aspect of life that cannot communicate in clear and ordinary ways. In Fink’s fiction, nature speaks. The Gniezna River in “A Spring Morning”, a nameless river in “Titina”, and the Rhine River in “Night of the Surrender”, all brim with associations and themes concerning connections between language, time, meaning, God, nature, and human suffering during the Holocaust. They have unspeakable things to say, refusing to remain silent in response to human atrocity. Full article

In literary narratives by Nava Semel (1954–2017) and Etgar Keret (b. 1967), both Israeli children of Holocaust survivors, readers encounter the kinds of searching questions about inheriting the burden of traumatic inheritance, witnessing, and postmemory frequently intrinsic to second-generation literature in other national contexts. However, their works are further distinguished by acute examinations that probe the moral fabric of Israeli society itself, including dehumanization of the enemy through slogans and other debased forms of language and misuses of historical memory. In addition, their fiction measures the distance between the suffering and pain of intimate family memory (what Semel once dubbed their “private Shoah”) and ceremonial, nationalistic forms of Holocaust memory, and the apartness felt by the children of survivors who sense themselves somehow at odds with their society’s heroic values. Semel’s numerous articles, and fiction as well as nonfiction books, frequently address second and third-generation trauma, arguably most impressively in her harrowing five-part novel And the Rat Laughed (2001) that spans 150 years but most crucially juxtaposes the experiences of a “hidden child” in a remote wartime Polish village repeatedly raped with that of her grandchild writing a dutiful report for her class in contemporary Israel. Elsewhere, in a distant future, a bewildered but determined anthropologist is set on assembling a scientific report with coherent meaning from the fragmented “myths” inherited from the barbaric past. Over the years, Keret (generally known more for whimsical and surreal tales) has often spoken in interviews as well as his memoir about being raised by survivors. “Siren”, set in a Tel Aviv high school, is one of the most acclaimed of Keret’s realist stories (and required reading in Israeli high schools), raises troubling questions about Israeli society’s official forms of Holocaust mourning and remembrance and individual conscience. It is through their portrayals of the cognitive and moral struggles of children and adolescents, the destruction of their innocence, and gradual awakening into compassionate awareness that Semel and Keret most shine, each unwavering in preserving the Shoah’s legacy as a form of vigilance against society’s abuses, whether toward “internal” or “external” others. Full article

This article aims to uncover the tensions and connections between Lisa Appignanesi’s autobiographical work Losing the Dead (1999) and her novel The Memory Man (2004) and to point out that, in spite of belonging to different genres, they share several formal, thematic, and structural features. By applying close-reading and narratological tools and drawing on relevant theories within Trauma, Memory, and Holocaust Studies, I would like to demonstrate that both works can be defined as limit-case narratives on the grounds that they blur literary genres, fuse testimonial and narrative layers, include metatextual references to memory and trauma, and represent and perform the transgenerational encounter with traumatic memories. Moreover, Appignanesi’s creations will be contextualised within the trend of hybrid life-writing narratives developed by contemporary British-Jewish women writers. Accordingly, these authors are contributing to the expansion of innovative liminal autobiographical and fictional practices that try to represent what it means to be a Jew, a migrant, and an inheritor of traumatic experiences in the post-Holocaust world. Finally, I launch a further reflection on the generic hybridisation characterising those contemporary narratives based on the negotiation of transgenerational memories, which will be read as a fruitful strategy to problematize the conflicts created when the representation of the self and (family) trauma overlap. Full article

This article discusses the apparent desire in Anglo-American Holocaust fiction to form a deeper connection to the horror of the Holocaust by recreating scenes of suffering in the gas chamber. Using Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, Alison Landsberg’s theory of ‘prosthetic memory’ and the concept of ‘feeling-with’ as outlined by Sonia Kruks, it discusses the motives underlying these representations and what an audience stands to learn from these bodily encounters with the Holocaust past. The article begins by discussing texts that explore the notions of temporal and emotional distance and the unreachability of the Holocaust dead, while also reflecting the corresponding impulse to reconnect with the murdered by physicalising them as bodies in pain. It then moves on to works that aim to make the experience of death in the gas chamber literally inhabitable for present-day nonwitnesses. In pursuing this argument, the article focuses on six representative texts: Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil (1998), Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone (2001), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006 and 2008, for the book and film respectively), In Paradise (2014) by Peter Matthiessen and Mick Jackson’s Denial (2016). Full article

This article explores the problematic representation of female sufferers in works of fiction relating to the Holocaust. Specifically, I contend that modern fiction fails to engage with the moral and emotional complexity of wartime sexual compromise and instead replaces a cognitive understanding of history with a bodily connection to women’s wartime pain. I do so by focusing on Heather Morris’s two Holocaust-themed texts: The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018) and Cilka’s Journey (2019). Morris, the article contends, cannot connect to the psychological or moral reality of Cilka’s wartime abuse and so instead focuses on the corporealization of her suffering. Having established the existence of the trend in Morris’s fiction, the article then also addresses Morris’s associated need to morally contextualise Cilka’s actions. In order to maintain her connection with Cilka’s body, I assert, Morris must frame Cilka’s actions using the incompatible morality of the post-war present day. To provide the character with depth would block Morris’s engagement with Cilka’s body as a post-memorial nonwitness. This is profoundly problematic as, rather than informing our understanding of the Holocaust past, Morris merely perpetuates a view of the event that is objectifying, de-humanising and frequently misogynistic. Full article

Crime writing is not often associated with Holocaust representations, yet an emergent trend, especially in German literature, combines a general, popular interest in crime and detective fiction with historical writing about the Holocaust, or critically engages with the events of the Shoah. Particularly worthy of critical investigation are Bernhard Schlink’s series of detective novels focusing on private investigator Gerhard Selb, a man with a Nazi background now investigating other people’s Nazi pasts, and Ferdinand von Schirach’s The Collini Case (2011) which engages with the often inadequate response of the post-war justice system in Germany to Nazi crimes. In these novels, the detective turns historian in order to solve historic cases. Importantly, readers also follow in the detectives’ footsteps, piecing together a slowly emerging historical jigsaw in ways that compel them to question historical knowledge, history writing, processes of institutionalised commemoration and memory formation, all of which are key issues in Holocaust Studies. The aims of this paper are two-fold. Firstly, I will argue that the significance of this kind of fiction has been insufficiently recognised by critics, perhaps in part because of its connotations as popular fiction. Secondly, I will contend that these texts can be fruitfully analysed by situating them in relation to recent debates about pious and impious Holocaust writing as discussed by Gillian Rose and Matthew Boswell. As a result, these texts act as exemplars of Rose’s contention that impious Holocaust literature succeeds by using new techniques in order to shatter the emotional detachment that has resulted from the use of clichés and familiar tropes in traditional pious accounts; and by placing detectives and readers in a position of moral ambivalence that complicates their understanding of the past on the one hand, and their own moral position on the other. Full article

This article analyses the function and symbolic currency of Poland’s recent literary and artistic motif of the returning Jew, which brings the nation’s Jewish Holocaust victims back to their homes as ghosts, spectres and reanimated corpses. It explores the ability of this trope—the defining feature of what I call ‘Polish Holocaust horror’—to cultivate the memory of complicitous and collaborative Polish behaviour during the Holocaust years, and to promote renewed Polish-Jewish relations based upon a working-through of this difficult history. In the article I explore Władysław Pasikowski’s 2012 film Aftermath as a self-reflexive product of this experimental genre, which has been considered ethically ambiguous for its necropolitical treatment of Jews and politically controversial for its depiction of Poles as perpetrators. My analysis examines haunting as central to these popular cultural constructions of Holocaust memory—a device that has been used within the genre to mourn but also expel guilt for the previously forgotten or supressed dispossession and murder of Jews by some of their Polish neighbours. Full article

In 2012, the Christian evangelical organization Focus on the Family published Escape to the Hiding Place, the ninth book in Adventures in Odyssey’s Imagination Station book series. This short children’s book is a creative reimagining of Corrie ten Boom’s Holocaust memoir The Hiding Place (1971). Corrie was a Christian who lived in Haarlem during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Corrie and her family helped hide Jews and non-Jews from arrest and deportation at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. Corrie’s story has played a significant role in the evangelical Christian encounter with the Holocaust. Like every Imagination Station story, Escape to the Hiding Place features two cousins, Patrick and Beth, from the fictional town of Odyssey. They travel back in time to help Jews escape the Nazis, all so they can learn a lesson about their ability to aid others in need. A harrowing adventure ensues. This paper does not criticize the valuable rescue work undertaken by Christians during the Holocaust, nor does it criticize the contemporary evangelical desire to draw meaning from Christian rescue work. Rather, the fictional narrative under consideration skews toward an overly simplistic representation of the Christian response to the murder of Jews during World War Two, contains a flat reading of Dutch society during the war, and fails to address antisemitism or racism. This paper situates Escape to the Hiding Place within a wider evangelical popular culture that has struggled with the history of the Holocaust apart from redemptive Christian biographies. Full article

This paper will explore Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy, composed of March Violets (1989), The Pale Criminal (1990), and A German Requiem (1991), discussing the overlap and blurring of generic boundaries in these novels and the ability of this form to reckon with the Holocaust. These detective stories are not directly about the Holocaust, and although the crimes investigated by the mordant Bernie Gunther are fictional, they are interweaved with the greater crimes committed daily by the Nazi Party. The novels are brutally realistic, violent, bleak, and harsh, in a narrative style highly appropriate for crime novels set in Nazi Germany. Indeed, with our knowledge of the enormity of the Nazi crimes, the violence in the novels seems not gratuitous but reflective of the era. Bernie Gunther himself, who is both hard-boiled protagonist and narrator, is a deeply flawed human, even an anti-hero, but in Berlin, which is “alive” as a character in these novels, his insights, cloaked in irony and sarcasm, highlight the struggle to resist, even passively, even just inside one’s own mind, the current of Nazism. Although many representations of the Holocaust in popular fiction strive towards the “feel good” story within the story, Kerr’s morally and generically ambiguous novels never give in to this urge, and the solution of the crime is never redemptive. The darkness of these novels, paired with the popularity of crime fiction, make for a significant vehicle for representing the milieu in which the Holocaust was able to occur. Full article

The publication of Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader (1995) sparked conversation and controversy about sexuality, female perpetrators and the complexity of guilt regarding the Holocaust. The screen adaptation of the book (Daldry 2008) amplified these discussions on an international scale. Fictional Holocaust films have a history of being met with skepticism or even reject on the one hand and great acclaim on the other hand. As this paper will outline, the focus has often been on male perpetrators and female victims. The portrayal of female perpetration reveals dichotomous stereotypes, often neglecting the complexity of the subject matter. This paper focuses on the ways in which sexualization is used specifically to portray female perpetrators in The Reader, as a fictional Holocaust film. An assessment of Hanna’s relationship to Michael and her autonomous sexuality and her later inferior, victimized portrayal as an ambiguous perpetrator is the focus of my paper. Hanna’s sexuality is structurally separated from her role as a perpetrator. Hanna’s perpetration is, through the dichotomous motif of sexuality throughout the film, characterized by a feminization. However, this feminization entails a relativization of Hanna’s culpability, revealing a pejorative of her depiction as a perpetrator. Consequently, I argue that Hanna’s sexualized female body is constructed as a central part of the revelation of her perpetration. Full article