How do we talk about the Holocaust now? What shape do critical discourses in Holocaust studies take at this point in time, a time that will see the end of direct survivor testimony? What aims, assumptions, interests, and commitments are involved in our contemporary engagement with Holocaust history, memory, and representation? What are the current preoccupations of scholars and critics in a reevaluation of the literatures, film, and other media of Holocaust representation? What kinds of questions are we asking of these narratives? As we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century, modes of Holocaust representation and its critical discourses reflect the shifting directional pull of time and its convergence with accumulating knowledge: well over half a century since the end of the war and the liberation of the concentration camps; long since the many voices of survivors have been recorded, cataloged, and written about; and following now the reimagining of events by a second and third generation of writers committed to the extension of Holocaust memory. How, âafter such knowledge,â as Eva Hoffman once put it, is the Holocaust and its extended aftermath navigated, conveyed, and kept alive in the collective consciousness of new generations of scholars?1 What, after scores of attempts to accumulate, to understand, and to articulate the nature and magnitude of events, is there left to say? After years and volumes of histories, literary accounts, documents, reportage, media, and cinemaââyards of writing,â as Berel Lang has argued, âthat attempt to overcome the inadequacy of language in representing moral enormityâ2âwhat remains? What is left unsaid? What, in the extended legacy of the Holocaust, has been mislaid, overlooked, lost to time? As Edmund de Waal, inheritor of the treasured artifacts of his familyâs past and author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, asks of the story behind such a legacy, âWhat is remembered and what is forgotten?â3 What is seen in the backward glance created by distance?
How, then, might we hope to get it right? How might the pastâthis particular pastâcontinue to be disarranged and unpacked so as to be reassembled? As child survivor Ruth Kluger puts it, âWe all splash in dark waters when it comes to the past, to this past.â4 And, at this particular moment in post-Holocaust history, when the voices of the eyewitnesses increasingly exist solely in the archives of recorded memory, as Lothe, Suleiman, and Phelan ask, â[w]ill the disappearance of the last witness affect the way public discourse deals with the Holocaust? Will the Holocaust become, perhaps for the first time, truly âpast historyâ? How will writers [âŠ] who may have no personal connection to the event engage with that history: what kinds of stories will they tell, and will they succeed in their effort to keep the public memory of the event from being lost?â5 What might be asked of the literature might well be asked of critical discourses as well: How will scholars of Holocaust literature, film, and the richly figured forms of memory talk about and navigate such texts? In what directions will the critical, filtered gaze turn? How might we cross the increasingly widening generational divide? In some decisive ways, the critical concerns, if continuing to negotiate some of the same demands, have shifted focus to the increasing effects of temporal, geopolitical, and experiential contingencies and constraints on Holocaust writing. To what extent do time, distance, culture, and geography alter and rearrange our perspective? Literary and scholarly accounts of the Holocaust constitute a diverse body of work in terms of genre and approach as well as the position from which one views the past. As Hilene Flanzbaum puts it, âthe shape and language of memory is dictated by cultural contexts [âŠ] where you are standing and when you are standing [âŠ] makes all the difference in the world.â6 Thus, the body of literature and critical discourses that constitute the field of Holocaust literary and cultural studies draw upon and reflect the shape, changing paradigms, and central preoccupations of shifting generational contexts. As Ann Rigney poses, âif the (un) representability of the Holocaust was the central issue in cultural theory for decades, seventy years after the end of World War II, this has become compounded by the issue of accessibility: the moral and imaginative difficulties of later generations in overcoming the experiential gap between âthenâ and ânow.ââ7 How, in other words, are scholars moving Holocaust narratives into the future, all the while remaining faithful to that which is substantial, foundational? As David Roskies and Naomi Diamant provocatively suggest, âto tell one story well requires that one not try to tell every story.â8 What stories will we tell as history and attention move forward in time and generation?
Inevitably, as we move farther and farther from the events of the Holocaust, memory becomes narrative and the corresponding scholarship responds not only to the corrosive effects of the acceleration of time but also to the new directions and developing shapes of testimony and the ways in which we talk about witnessing. These new directions will shape how critical discourses approach and adjudicate, not only newly fashioned modes of expression and the works of well-established, recognized writers, but also the work of recovery. As Roskies proposes, âHolocaust literature [âŠ] unfolds both backward and forward: backward, as previously unknown works are published, annotated, translated, catalogued [âŠ] and forward, as new works of ever greater subtlety or simplicity come into beingâ (3). Thus, even as time and distance intercede, introducing perhaps more proximate concerns and preoccupations in both writing and scholarship, a wide array of writers and scholars are increasingly engaging with the subject of the Holocaust, and they are so in newly framed, newly articulated genres, approaches, and perspectives.
Such a looking forward is what we hope to have accomplished by way of the chapters in The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture. This collection of essays reflects current approaches to Holocaust literature that, we hope, open up future thinking on Holocaust representation. What kinds of questions are scholars asking of Holocaust literature? What narratives persist and in what form? As Roskies and Diamant ask, âWho speaks for the Holocaust? [âŠ] How shall they speak?â (1â2). These are stories that, as Kluger insists, âshouldnât even exist to be told,â but they are, nonetheless, stories that âhave no endâ (40, 83). There is an intergenerational continuity not only in Holocaust writing, as the second and now third generations of Holocaust survivors have added their voices to Holocaust memory and the traumatic inscription of that history, but also a new generation of scholars who come to the Holocaust as a subject only now in the early decades of the twenty-first century. In Holocaust writing that has emerged since the turn of the millennium, we see a variety of different genres, different effects, and different forms of representation. The corresponding scholarship engages with and responds to the literature and other Holocaust cultural artifacts as it measures both their efficacy and uniqueness. Thus, the chapters in this volume reflect diverse generational perspectivesâsurvivor writing, second and third generationsâand genresâmemoirs, poetry, novels, graphic narratives, films, video-testimonies, and other forms of literary and cultural expression. Viewed alongside one another, the chapters unfold in a kind of dialogue; through their arrangement, we have attempted to create interactions among generations, genres, temporalities, and cultural contexts. As Roskies and Diamant suggest, â[i]t did not take a generation for a literary response to the Holocaust to be born. But it took at least two generations for its history to acquire a shape. Literary history is the sum of many stories and it has taken this long for the stories within the story to be toldâ (8).
As we become ever more temporally distanced from the events of the Holocaust and as we build on past approaches, how do we navigate the complex narrative terrain of the stories of stories told? As the late Israeli psychologist Dan Bar-On suggested, modes of narrating the past matter; they redirect our attentions not only to what happened, âhistorical truths,â but how we talk about the events of the historical past, ânarrative truths [âŠ] how someone tells what happened.â It is thus through such a fluid âintergenerational transmissionâ of narratives that âone generationâs story can influence and shape the stories of the next generations.â9 The direction from which we approach the narratives of the past shapes modes of representation and practices of remembering. As editors Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner, and Todd Presner suggest, in the introduction to Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, â[t]he tour dâhorizon of Holocaust studies raises intriguing questionsâŠincluding how one chooses to narrate the history of Holocaust remembrance in what context, for whom, and to what ends.â10 There are, of course, many ways of telling, a wide range of modes of representation that respond to points of departure and different kinds of distance. That is, the direction from which a story is told depends, in large part, on the place from which one approaches the material: geographical, temporal, experiential, and narrative aims and strategies, in order, as Hayden White suggests âto generate ways of mediating between the corpus of facts known about the Holocaust and the various meanings that our ethical interests [âŠ] demand of us.â11 There are different kinds of telling, different kinds of testimony and commemoration. What matters is that the stories are told, stories, as David Grossman insists, âwhich have to be told again and again because that is the only way to assemble the traces of identity and fuse the fragments of a crumbled world.â12 Thus, the chapters that follow hope to add to the existing scholarship on Holocaust representation by uncovering new forms of expression, new directions, gestures, and transactions through which the stories of the past are renegotiated, reframed, and reexamined from new angles, new points of departure.
The chapters in this volume present a variety of writing that, as S. Lillian Kremer has suggested, participates in the project of âunderstanding the twentieth centuryâs horrendous history, its psychological and theological aftermath, and the moral imperative to bear witness thereby fulfilling an obligation inherent in the Jewish tradition of remembering and reiterating the historic narrative.â13 In doing so, these chapters, in examining diverse genres and forms of expression from a range of critical points of departure, participate also in the ongoing project of responding to and talking through moments of rupture and incompletion. Holocaust representation is, after all, an opportunity to contribute to the making of meaning through the continuation of narratives of the past. As such, the chapters in this volume pose options for reading Holocaust texts, offering openings for further discussion and exploration. The inquiring body of interpretive scholarship responding to the Shoah becomes itself a story, a narrative that materially extends our inquiry into that history.
As part of the process of ongoing inquiry, then, this collection of essays seeks to create a lively dialogue among an array of texts and voices. There is no guiding methodological or theoretical frame from which the individual scholars approach the subject of the Holocaust; there is no single, preferred way in, no single point of departure or point of origin for discovery. That is, the essays in this collection hope to raise more questions than answers, opening further possibilities for Holocaust representation. Thus, the chapters themselves represent a chorus of generational voices that are deeply engaged in making emphatic the complexities of witnessing, of testimony, and of transmission in their attempts to locate a fitting response to art made of atrocity. These chapters speak at once to the open and fruitful possibilities of new forms of representation all the while exposing the limits of such representation.
As the proliferation of publications, films, media depictions, and annual scholarly conferences demonstrates, interest in historical and cultural representations of the Holocaust remains unabated. Although the field of Holocaust studies has always been multifaceted, its foundation rests upon historical excavation and archival research that exposes and corroborates Nazi Germanyâs crimes against humanity. The âtraumatic ruptureâ of the Holocaust, to borrow a term from Joshua Hirsch, in its various forms, continues to be interrogated, reopened.14 Our knowledge of th...