Trauma in First Person

Diary Writing During the Holocaust

Amos Goldberg

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780253030214
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria ebraica

An examination of what can be learned by looking at the journals and diaries of Jews living during the Holocaust. What are the effects of radical oppression on the human psyche? What happens to the inner self of the powerless and traumatized victim, especially during times of widespread horror? In this bold and deeply penetrating book, Amos Goldberg addresses diary writing by Jews under Nazi persecution. Throughout Europe, in towns, villages, ghettos, forests, hideouts, concentration and labor camps, and even in extermination camps, Jews of all ages and of all cultural backgrounds described in writing what befell them. Goldberg claims that diary and memoir writing was perhaps the most important literary genre for Jews during World War II. Goldberg considers the act of writing in radical situations as he looks at diaries from little-known victims as well as from brilliant diarists such as Chaim Kaplan and Victor Kemperer. Goldberg contends that only against the background of powerlessness and inner destruction can Jewish responses and resistance during the Holocaust gain their proper meaning. "This is a book that deserves to be read well beyond Holocaust studies. Goldberg's theoretical insights into "life stories" and his readings of law, language and what he calls the "epistemological grey zone"... provide a stunning antidote to our unthinking treatment of survivors as celebrities (as opposed to just people who have suffered terrible things) and to the ubiquity of commemorative platitudes." — Times Higher Education "Every decade or so, an exceptional volume is born. Provocative and inspiring, historian Goldberg's volume is one such work in the field of Holocaust studies.... Highly recommended." — Choice "Amos Goldberg's Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the Holocaust is an important and thought-provoking book not only on reading Holocaust diaries, but also on what that reading can tell us about the extent of the destruction committed against Jews during the Holocaust." —Reading Religion "Amos Goldberg's work offers an innovative approach to the subject matter of Holocaust diaries and challenges well-established views in the whole field of Holocaust studies. This is a comprehensive discussion of the phenomenon of Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust and after." —Guy Miron. Author of The Waning of Emancipation: Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, and Hungary "This is an important contribution to trauma studies and a powerful critique of those who use the "crisis" paradigm to study the Holocaust." —Dovile Budryt, Georgia Gwinnett College, Holocaust and Genocide Studies

PART I

READING HOLOCAUST DIARIES

1

HOLOCAUST DIARIES

Between Life Story and Trauma

HUMANS ARE storytelling creatures. We tell stories throughout our lives—about ourselves, our families, our communities, our past, and our future. Some stories we tell aloud to others and some we tell to ourselves, within the confines of our own consciousness. Through the stories we tell about ourselves, we constitute our identities because it is through our stories that we organize the events of our lives—disparate in time and place—into a coherent form. For example, stories allow us to create a causal relationship between different events, or to make certain events central and others secondary. The story is also constantly changing—thereby changing the significance of the events in our lives. Stories have the power to situate us within our respective societies and cultures, because the building blocks of the story, such as language, figurative patterns, intertextual connotations, and even the genre within which the story is told are based on the existing practices and structures in the cultures and societies in which we live. A person may, for example, construct his or her character as a tragic or comic hero or even an antihero. Each of these choices will afford different meaning to the same events and will situate the narrator differently in relation to them, although the genre types themselves are all present within the culture. These public building blocks are, in effect, what enable us to communicate our stories to others, and what render the story—even when it is not actually communicated but remains within the narrator’s head—a social, intersubjective act. Herein lies the power and appeal of the ongoing “life story” that each and every one of us tells himself or herself, in order to create identity and meaning. In the following pages, I will focus on two central aspects of narrative that will feature throughout the book.

The first aspect is time. The theoretical foundations for understanding the ability of narrative to organize time and thereby constitute identity were largely laid by Paul Ricoeur.¹ There is a correlation, claims Ricoeur, between narrative and the nature of the human experience of time.² Through what Ricoeur termed “emplotment,” the story manages to create a synthesis of a number of distinct elements, turning them into a relatively complete continuity. In other words, the story creates a kind of coherent integration of the events in a person’s life.³ According to Ricoeur, “composing a story is . . . drawing a configuration out of a succession.”⁴ The narrative is not a reflection of meaning and representation that exist independently outside it and detached from the language on which it is based. On the contrary, the organizational qualities of the narrative, like the differences created by the symbolic networks of language, are what constitute identity. This is the principal force of the life story. And indeed, a successful life story, claims Charlotte Linde, is a story that succeeds in organizing the self, that is creating basic coherence. Linde stresses, in particular, the causal relationship established by the narrative. The narrative thus creates a self whose past is relevant to its present—because the present is largely an outcome of that past. The autobiographical story affords the narrator a sense of continuity (or perhaps a necessary illusion of continuity) and the past becomes relevant to the present that stems from it. Linde compares this temporal continuity and the relevance of the past dimension to the present while opening prospects for the future—to a musical composition played legato rather than staccato.⁵

Another aspect of the story pertains to the two domains of self it comprises—the narrating self and the narrated self. The relation between these domains is crucial to the narrative identity of the individual.

Intuitively, we generally experience ourselves as a single entity. Sometimes though, we feel that our self is composed of a number of domains that do not necessarily act in coordination or harmony with one another. We may desire something and, at the same time, recoil from it, in the knowledge that it may harm us. In many ways, the story highlights the multiplicity of the self, through the varied and sometimes contradictory elements it necessarily contains but, in the end, also enables them to exist within a single narrative framework. Beyond this, however, the story possesses a structural characteristic that gives particular prominence to such divisions within the self, as the story necessarily incorporates two domains of self—the self that experienced the events and acts in the world, and the self that is able to step away from these events and acts, observe them, consider them, and then recount them. Logically and formally, the latter self follows the former, which the latter observes from “without,” as if describing another person. In narrative terms, the first self may be said to be the protagonist of the autobiographical story, created as its main character—acting, feeling, thinking, and experiencing—the story’s central axis and center of gravity. The second self, on the other hand, is the narrating self that engages in the act of narration, the one that creates the story in which the protagonist self features. These two instances of the self coincide neither in situation nor in function: the narrator stands outside the event described, while the protagonist experiences or acts within the event itself. In many ways, every autobiographical story is based on this division and the constant tension between these two domains of the self.⁶ Moreover, as the linguist Emile Benveniste teaches us, every time a person says “I,” he or she divides in two like an amoeba. There is the self that says “I” (subject) and the self that is described (object).⁷ A successful life story is one that organizes not only the human experience of time in a reasonable fashion but also the different domains of self—particularly those of protagonist and narrator. It is a story that conducts complex and intense negotiations between these two aspects to prevent them from growing too much apart and becoming alienated from one another, but also from collapsing into one another.

Over the course of the book, I will address both aspects of the self in the life stories recounted in the first person in the diaries: the narrated protagonist self and the narrator self—each of which raises a series of questions. In the discussion of the first aspect, I will ask how the autobiographical story in the diaries is organized. Is there really a continuity between the events of the narrative that enables the constitution of the protagonist self as the focus of the story? Is identity created through the means cited above—first and foremost integration and coherence of the protagonist’s various temporal dimensions? Is the past relevant to the present and does it delineate prospects for the future? In the discussion of the second aspect, on the other hand, I will ask other questions, regarding the act of narration rather than the narrative it produces—questions pertaining to the manifest and hidden motivations of writers in the first person. I will ask who is really performing this act of speech and who influences it? Where do the speakers situate themselves through the act of narration and, especially, to whom does the voice that emerges really belong?

The diary, although not considered part of the classic autobiographical genre—in which individuals recount their lives in retrospect from a distance in time—is, nevertheless, a kind of ongoing story in the first person, which presents all the identity-creating characteristics of the life story and autobiography, albeit, as noted in the introduction, in a far more fragmentary fashion. This capacity of the diary may explain, in part, the prevalence of first-person writing during the Holocaust. In such a turbulent time, when all the components of identity are radically undermined, when the concepts of yesterday can no longer explain what is happening today and are unable to offer hope for tomorrow, people find it hard to understand themselves and the world, to establish order and find meaning.⁸ At such a time, diary writing may help writers preserve a shred of their identity and afford a modicum of cohesion to the world into which they have been thrust. The diary weaves fine narrative threads between the fragments of the protagonist’s disintegrating world. These aspects of the diary may offer a partial explanation of the assertions made by many writers, noting the importance of writing to them—to the point of near-total dependence on it. Writing in the Vilna ghetto, the Bundist Herman Kruk referred to his diary as “the hashish of my life in the ghetto.”⁹

Thus far, I have presented, in brief, the “optimal” model of a life story by means of which writers constitute their narrative identities. This approach is well-suited to an “ordinary” life story, in which the events recounted do not exceed the limits of conventional human experience.¹⁰ It is unsuited, however, to the description of traumatic events because the temporal (dis)order of the traumatic event differs completely from the linear, continuous temporality of the life story and, in effect, destroys it.¹¹ The act of language also loses its constitutive meaning. The traumatic event thus threatens not only the protagonist but also the narrator of the story. To explain, I will provide a general outline of the aspects of traumatic experience that undermine the foundations of narrative identity—illustrating by means of readings from diaries written at that time. It is not my intention to provide an exhaustive study or even an overview of the concept of trauma but, at most, to point to a number of characteristics pertinent to the present discussion.¹²

Trauma is an event of a total nature, during which the subject feels “intense fear, helplessness, loss of control, and threat of annihilation.”¹³ “Something alien breaks in on you, smashing through whatever barriers your mind has set up as a line of defense. It invades you, possesses you, takes you over, becomes a dominating feature of your interior landscape, and in the process threatens to drain you and leave you empty.”¹⁴ It is thus an event that fundamentally threatens the psychic economy. The defense mechanisms are incapable of preventing or regulating the excess of stimuli that overwhelm the psyche and thus collapse. The psyche therefore lacks the capacity to respond to them in an appropriate fashion, and is left helpless.¹⁵ This helplessness exists on a number of planes: in the face of the devastating external events; on the plane of their psychic elaboration; and later, in light of the symptoms that appear and reappear at a compulsive and uncontrolled frequency.

At the heart of the traumatic experience is, as Dominick LaCapra put it, an “unrepresentable excess.”¹⁶ Trauma is the occurrence of a terrible event, the extreme terror of which cannot be fully represented by means of language or other symbolic systems. Any attempt to fully represent this event is doomed to failure.¹⁷ Even when it is factually accurate, the description of the traumatic event cannot contain or fully symbolize the terrifying dimension of the experience. This is why many of the diary writers feel that they are unable to describe in words the experience they are seeking to document, even when their descriptions are accurate and detailed. The thing that escapes consciousness is not necessarily a factual detail (although, at times, facts or events may also be “erased” from memory), but something more, related to the meaning of the experience. As one of many possible examples, I cite the following passage from the diary of Avraham Lewin from Warsaw, written on 26 May 1942, toward the end of the ghetto’s existence but before the deportations to Treblinka had begun:

The blood of our children will never be erased from the Cain’s forehead of the German people! It is only now that I understand Bialik’s sorrow and rage in the poem “On the Slaughter.” . . . If Kishinev alone could arouse such reverberations of suffering in a Jewish heart, what is happening in our hearts after the greatest tragedy we have ever known? And perhaps because the tragedy is without measure, we are entirely unable to express all of our feelings. Only if we were to be given the possibility of uprooting the greatest of all mountains, Everest, by the strength of our choked suffering, to cast it with rage and force on the head of all the Germans . . . this would be the only response worthy of our time. We have lost the ability to use words.¹⁸

In this entry, Lewin draws on his cultural resources to express his extreme feelings. At the beginning of the passage, he attempts to paraphrase a poem by the Jewish poet of rage, Haim Nahman Bialik (a poem that, in itself, alludes with irony to the myth of the binding of Isaac), in order to express, in words, the extreme traumatic events experienced by the Jews of Warsaw. Since these events were both beyond the realm of the writer’s own experience and outside the historical-cultural context of Jewish collective experience (“the greatest tragedy we have ever known”), they could not easily be organized and represented within the boundaries of language and culture. Bialik’s poetic hyperbole, so apt in the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom, paled in the face of the reality of the Warsaw ghetto in its last days. The events thus escape the continuity of the familiar tools of cultural expression as well. It is the inexpressibility of the horror (“our choked suffering”) that affords the events their traumatic and excessive nature, that gives rise to a desire that can never be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: “If This Is a Man”
• Part I. Reading Holocaust Diaries
• Part II. From Autobiographical Time to Documentation Time: Victor Klemperer’s Diary
• Part III. The Jewish Self under Nazi Domination: Chaim Kaplan’s Warsaw Diary
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author