Auschwitz and After

Race, Culture, and "the Jewish Question" in France

Lawrence D. Kritzman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135231088
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Beginning with Marcel Ophus's documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1970) there has been an attempt to question the idea of a totally unified, courageous and resistant wartime France. Even more startling have been the increasingly shocking revelations that the politics of collaboration were a mere extension of a deep-seated French anti-semitic tradition. In the shadow of these developments French writers and philosophers today are reflecting on the meaning of Jewish identity in the contemporary world. Auschwitz and After analyses for the first time how the memory of Auschwitz and the collaboration continue to haunt the French. These critical evaluations are accompianed by provocative essays on the "jewish Question" and the politics of race as they have been studied by writers, historians, philosophers and film makers in postwar France.

IV

Writing After Auschwitz: Literary Representations

12

Beyond Psychoanalysis

ELIE WIESEL’S NIGHT IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Ora Avni

Night is the story of a young boy’s journey through hell, as he is taken first to a ghetto, and then to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It is a story of survival and of death: survival of the young narrator himself, but death of the world as he knew it.¹ It is therefore a negative Bildungsroman, in which the character does not end up, as expected, fit for life in society, but on the contrary, a living dead, unfit for life as defined by his community.

Its opening focuses not so much on the boy, however, as on a foreigner, Moshe the Beadle, a wretched yet good-natured and lovable dreamer, versed in Jewish mysticism. When the town’s foreign Jews are deported by the Nazis to an unknown destination, he leaves with them; but he comes back. Having miraculously survived the murder of his convoy, he hurries back to warn the others. No longer singing, humming, or praying, he plods from door to door, desperately repeating the same stories of calm and dispassionate killings. But, despite his unrelenting efforts, “people refused not only to believe his stories, but even to listen to them” (p. 4).

Like Moshe the Beadle, the first survivors who told their stories either to other Jews or to the world were usually met with disbelief. When the first escapees from Ponar’s killing grounds tried to warn the Vilna ghetto that they were not sent to work but to be murdered, not only did the Jews not believe them, but they accused the survivors of demoralizing the ghetto, and demanded that they stop spreading such stories.² Similarly, when Jan Karski, the courier of the Polish government-in-exile who had smuggled himself into the Warsaw Ghetto so that he could report the Nazi’s atrocities as an eyewitness, made his report to Justice Felix Frankfurter, the latter simply said, “I don’t believe you.” Asked to explain, he added, “I did not say that this young man is lying. I said I cannot believe him. There is a difference.”³ How are we to understand this disbelief? What are its causes and effects, and above all, what lesson can we learn from it?

Shoah Narratives and the Scene of Narration

In this episode, the actual tales of Nazi atrocities occupy only a fraction of the narrative. Most of the section deals with Moshe the Beadle’s easy manners and deep faith before his ordeal, and his desperate and obsessive storytelling after his return. This section mirrors the narrator’s account in reverse: while the boy’s account of his adventure is the actual story of death and survival with no “before” or “after,” the opening section calls our attention precisely to the difference between “before” and “after,” when after means both after the event and after the telling of the event. It thus steers us towards the scene of narration (all but absent from the main story of the boy’s experience), that is, not only what actually and factually happened, but how it affects those who come in contact with the story of what happened. In so doing, it moves us towards the scene of narration of all Shoah narratives, towards the effects these narratives had and still have on their readers and listeners, and, in turn, towards the narrator’s reaction to these effects. We may thus say that the opening episode of Night stages the performing or performative aspects of survivors’ narratives, their effectiveness, and the consequences they may entail.

We must also note that Moshe the Beadle’s narrative does not only open the boy’s narrative as it first appears, but frames it on both ends: once the reader is aware of the consequences of telling such a story, he or she extends this awareness to the story told by the boy. The opening episode thus invites the reader to read beyond the abrupt end of Night, all the way to the moment absent from Night proper, when the newly freed boy tells his own tale of survival: will this story, too, meet with hostility, disbelief, and denial? (And who better than the reader knows that the boy did eventually tell his story, and that this tale constitutes the very text he or she is reading?) The scene of narration of the opening episode thus prefigures the scene of reading of Night. It is a pessimistic mise en abyme of the novel’s scene of reading; as such, it warns the reader of the consequences of disbelief no less than it warns the town folks.

Shoah narratives have given rise to a host of false problems. Faced with the horror of the Shoah and the suffering of its survivors, some have felt overwhelmed and, overcome with a sense of simple human decency, have questioned their right to examine an extreme experience in which they had no part.⁴ These scruples are, I think, misplaced: no one questions the right, or even the need of survivors to sort out their experience, or to bear witness. We readily concede survivors’ wish and right to bear witness, to leave a historical account of their ordeal for posterity. But what about this posterity (ourselves), what about the recipients of those narratives? We—the latecomers to the experience of the Shoah—shall never be able to fully grasp the abysmal suffering and despair of the survivors. And yet, not only do we share with them a scene of narration, but our participation in this scene of narration may have become the organizing principle of our lives and our own historical imperative. How, then, are we going to face up to this task? Like the town folks, we have gone through disbelief and denial. But today, two generations later, we have rediscovered the Shoah, as the numerous publications on the subject will attest (some even claim that we have trivialized the Shoah with excessive verbiage). How, then, are we to dispose of the knowledge conveyed by survivors’ narratives? How can we integrate the lesson of their testimonies in our historical project—at least, if ours is a project in which there is no room for racial discrimination, genocide, acquiescence to evil, passive participation in mass murder; a project in which “get involved” has come to replace “look the other way”?

Wiesel often mentions Moshe the Beadle in other works. Invariably he insists on Moshe’s need to commune with the town folks. In One Generation After, for example, Wiesel writes that upon his return, Moshe:

was unrecognizable: gone were his gentleness, his shyness. Impatient, irascible, he now wore the mysterious face of a messenger pursued by those whose message he carried. He who used to stutter whenever he had to say a single word, suddenly began to speak. He talked and talked without pity for either his listeners or himself... he alone survived. Why? So that he could come back to his town and tell the tale. And that is why he never stopped talking. But his audiences, weary and naïve, would not, could not believe. People said: Poor beadle, he has lost his mind. Finally he understood; and fell silent. Only his burning eyes reveal the impotent rage inside him. His muteness bordered on madness.⁵

On the one hand, Moshe’s distress is undoubtedly Wiesel’s. Like Moshe, Wiesel came back; like Moshe, he told his story; and like Moshe, he told it again and again. It is therefore not merely a question of informing others (for information purposes, once the story is told, one need not tell it again). Like Moshe, Wiesel clearly does not set out to impart information only, but to tell the tale, that is, to share a scene of narration with a community of readers. This explains why, while the Shoah is in fact the subject of all his texts, Wiesel, wiser than Moshe, never recounted his actual experience in the death camps again. Like the opening episode of Night, his other works deal with “before” and “after”: before, as a premonition of things to come; after, as a call for latecomers to see themselves accountable for living in a post-Shoah world. The opening episode thus encapsulates Wiesel’s life project, in that it invites us to reflect not only on the nature of the Shoah itself, but first, on living historically (that is, on living in a world of which the Shoah is part), and second, on transmitting this history from one person and one generation to the other.

I suggest therefore that we read the first episode for its exemplary value, as a beacon guiding our reading from the horror of the past to the imperatives of the present, all the while illuminating the Charybdis and Scylla of Shoah narratives: excessive distrust, as well as easy empathy; resentment of those who cannot let bygones be bygones, as well as a morbid and voyeuristic obsession with Shoah details; impatience with survivors’ pain, as well as glib recognition of the alienating effect of the survivors’ experience that frees us from partaking in their burden; an excessively inclusive approach that leads to an undiscriminating identification with Shoah participants (“We are all German Jews” of Cohn-Bendit), as well as excessive exclusiveness that frees all non-Jews (or even post-Shoah Jews) from deeming the Shoah experience relevant to one’s being-in-the-world today; trivializing the Shoah with a host of comparisons, as well as insisting on its uniqueness so much that it becomes alien and irrelevant to our reality.

To what, then, does this episode owe its exemplary value? Why has Moshe, the ultimate Shoah survivor-narrator, come back? Why does he feel compelled to endlessly repeat his story? Why does he no longer pray? On the other hand, why are his listeners so recalcitrant? Why do they not believe him? Why do they accuse him of madness or of ulterior motives? Why do they all but gag him? That this episode illustrates widespread attitudes towards all accounts of Nazi atrocities and Jewish victimization is unquestionable. We shall therefore focus on the self-positioning of the subject (teller or listener, knowledgeable or uninformed) in the face of accounts of the Shoah, be it at the dinner table, in the classroom, on the psychoanalyst’s couch, in academe, or in the morning paper. It is at once a positioning vis-à-vis one’s self, one’s interlocutors, and one’s community.

Therapeutic explanations

Attempts to account for failed communication of survivors‘ experience follow roughly two major lines, the first psychotherapeutic, the second cognitive.⁶ Among the first, we can cite collections of case studies of survivors who went through some form of extended therapy and, perhaps more interestingly for our purpose, of similar case studies of their children. The problems may vary from case to case, but certain themes prevail: denial, fear, survivor’s guilt, psychic numbing, derealization, depersonalization, paranoid attitudes, shock, identification either with a lost loved one or with the perpetrators, inability to mourn. These analyses are predicated on a strong belief in the healing virtue of therapy and in its ability to resolve the post-Shoah anxieties. In a now-classic collection of such case studies, the writer-editors state:

Elie Wiesel has repeatedly stated that survivors of the Holocaust live in a nightmare world that can never be understood. Although his opinion has its stark and bitter truth, we believe that the nightmare can be dispelled; that, through words, analysis can penetrate the shadowy inner world of the patient, which operates in metaphor, and, by illuminating it, diminish pain, and heal. Furthermore, analysis can demonstrate how the tragedy of one generation may be transmitted to the next, and then break the chain of suffering.⁷

I doubt that healing the victims or their children will heal the wound inflicted on our vision of man and society. The Shoah has shaken our vision of man so profoundly that, half a century later, we are still grappling with its aftermath, with our urgent albeit terrifying need for a radical reevaluation of our concept of man-in-the-world. And, as the reluctance to believe the stories or even to listen to them shows, this reevaluation does not befall only those who were the subjects of the event or their children (victims, perpetrators, or even bystanders). It extends to an entire generation. As Terence des Pres rightly notes, “the self s sense of itself is different now, and what has made the difference, both as cause and continuing condition, is simply knowing that the Holocaust occurred.”⁸ There is no denying that this “difference” may take the various forms inventoried by psychoanalysts—but it would be a mistake to reduce the aftermath of the Shoah to those forms alone.⁹

I shall therefore focus on approaches that do not regard the survivor in the privacy and intimacy of his or her personal experience only, but contextualize this experience in a community (and its modes of representation), in a narrative, and in a multi-generational culture. Now, since clinical therapy deals mostly with individuals, few therapists have adopted this path, and even fewer have done so with either rigor or consistency. Among the most interesting, and the most representative of the strengths and the limitations of individual therapy, I shall briefly mention two essays, one by Dori Laub and Nanette Auerhann, and the other by Martin Wangh.

Laub and Auerhann¹⁰ focus on the second generation—but on children of people not directly affected by the Shoah, Jews and non-Jews alike. They make two points: The first is that the Shoah has provided a handy metaphor, a linguistic mold subsequently used by patients to couch their non-Shoah related hostilities and violence. The second point goes further, in that it suggests that the patient cannot help but notice that his so-called metaphor is in fact quite literal: it denotes a past reality. This unavoidable literalization of the metaphor then grafts an external referent onto an internal conflict. Furthermore, in using such a metaphor, the patient (who is after all the author of the fantasized violence) finds himself identified with the Nazi perpetrators and, consequently, guilty of much more serious crimes than he would have bee...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction in the Shadows of Auschwitz Culture, Memories, and Self-Reflection
• I Histories, Memories, and Politics
• II Identities and Cultural Practices
• III Philosophy and Jews
• IV Writing After Auschwitz: Literary Representations
• V Cinematic Images
• List of Contributors