Writing the Holocaust

Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Daniel Langton

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781849664301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

Writing the Holocaust provides students and teachers with an accessibly written overview of the key themes and major theoretical developments which continue to inform the nature of historical writing on the Holocaust.

Holocaust studies is at a paradox: while historians of the Holocaust defend it as a legitimate and well-defined area of research, they write against a complex political and ideological background that undermines any claim for it as a normative field of historical study. Writing the Holocaust offers a lucid enquiry into this complex field by demonstrating the impact of current theories from the humanities and social sciences upon the treatment of Holocaust studies.

1

Gender: Writing Women, Writing the Holocaust

Dalia Ofer

About a quarter of a century ago one of the first studies on women and the Holocaust was published. This was Women Surviving the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Conference, edited by Esther Katz and Joan Miriam Ringelheim and published in New York by the Institute for Research in History. The proceedings brought to light the interest that the topic aroused and its complex nature. In the opening remarks Marjorie Lightman, Executive Director of the Institute for Research in History, which hosted the conference, said: ‘I commend the scholars who, by virtue of their feminism, are asking the questions that break the veil of historical silence.’¹

Joan Miriam Ringelheim, the academic chair of the conference and since then a leading scholar on gender and the Holocaust, commented in a later article on her correspondence with Cynthia Ozick. In 1980, Ozick had challenged Ringelheim’s employment of feminist methodology in studying the fate of women during the Holocaust:

I think you are asking the wrong question. Not simply the wrong question in the sense of not having found the right one; I think you are asking morally wrong questions, a question that leads us still further down the road of eradicating Jews from history … Your project is, in my view, an ambitious falsehood … The Holocaust happened to victims who were not seen as men, women, or children, but as Jews.²

This was reinforced by Dr Helen Fagin, herself a Holocaust survivor and a professor of English and director of Judaic Studies at the University of Miami: ‘I don’t want the Holocaust to be made secondary to feminism.’³ Both Ozick and Fagin were concerned with the motivations of scholars who were not interested in the Holocaust per se but were using it to further other agendas.

Since 1983, the literature concerning women in the Holocaust has developed to cover a large scope of subjects concerning the historical protagonists, perpetrators and collaborators, victims, rescuers and indifferent groups in relation to their mode of operation, motivations and behaviour.

Research trends may be divided into a few categories. One was motivated by the cultural feminism approach and demonstrated the perspective of women’s studies, as reflected in the works of Gisela Bock, Sybil Milton and to some extent also Claudia Koonz. Another tendency approached the issue from the wider perspective of social history and sociology as in the studies of Marion Kaplan, Lenore J. Weitzman, Judy Tydor Baumel, Dalia Ofer and others. The effort to integrate the gender perspective into overall discussions on Holocaust issues is manifested in the works of Nechama Tec (Resilience and Courage: Women Men and the Holocaust, concerning the Jewish victims), of Elizabeth Harvey (Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witness of Germanization) and in Lenore J. Weitzman’s research on the women couriers in the Jewish resistance.⁴

These publications have broadened the historical narrative and legitimized introduction of the perspective of the individual and their subjectivity into the core of the historical analysis of the Holocaust. They also aroused a greater awareness of a methodological issue: how to integrate and disseminate personal documentation such as letters, diaries, post-Holocaust memoirs and oral history into the historical narrative. These efforts led to the democratization of the field of research: not only heroes and heroines were the subject of research but normal people who were described through their activities in their daily life. The nuances added new information on women to the conventional knowledge of Holocaust events, while the personal points of view enriched the historical narratives, proving that the absence of women from the narratives had resulted in a partial, incomplete, reconstruction of events and prevented a comprehensive interpretation of the Holocaust.

These were evident in literature and sociology, and thus Holocaust research was enriched through a number of fields of study. The efforts to understand and incorporate women’s narratives stressed even further the multifaceted and complex reality.

In what follows I will relate some of the major themes that were studied and debated in Holocaust studies, concentrating on perpetrators and Jewish victims, and focusing on Germany and Eastern Europe. I will demonstrate my arguments through the fields of history and literature.

Main Themes and Fields Presented in Gender Analysis

Literature

Scholars of literature were among the first to concentrate on women’s writing and to use gender as a category of analysis. This was displayed in empirical as well as theoretical approaches that examined the themes of the genre and style of women’s writing during the Holocaust and its aftermath. They emphasized that women paid more attention to details in their narratives, expressed their emotions more openly and were more aware of themselves, the surrounding environment and of relations with the inmates.⁵ Through the literary output they studied the inner world of the author and the outer setting of these writings. Though all literary expressions are personal and exhibit first and foremost the writer’s own personality and understanding of reality, general conclusions can be drawn by reading a wide range of Holocaust literature. They applied theoretical concepts to both feminist texts and the studies on post trauma to gain an understanding of women’s writing on the Holocaust.⁶

One example from Holocaust poetry will demonstrate the transition from the subjective and intimate to the objective and public through gender analysis. The collection edited by Ruth Schwertfeger, Women of Theresienstadt: Voices from a Concentration Camp, published as early as 1989, demonstrates the distinctiveness of poetry and memoirs written by women in the camp. Schwertfeger reconstructs daily life in Theresienstadt by using the poems as her main source of information. Their day-to-day existence was the main concern of the camp’s inmates and the poetesses reflected it in their writings. Some of the poems were published after the war, as their authors survived, while others were found in the archives. The table of contents includes: ‘Day to Day Life in the Camp’, ‘Cultural Activities’ and ‘Transportation and Liberation’.⁷ Schwertfeger explains that the inmate authors’ needed to write as creative self-expression made their life and suffering more bearable. ‘Writing helped me,’ wrote Grete Salus.

But writing also served as testimony, sometimes with a moral lesson or just as an account of the events.⁸ Writing with the intention of producing a literary text demonstrated that, ‘To write a poem means to compromise, to elevate it from the intermediary stage for being and consciousness, to purposely give it form.’⁹ Gerty Spies, an inmate in Theresienstadt, described her relationship to her own poems after lying awake at night memorizing her verses: ‘I held them tight, they held me tight – we held each other.’¹⁰ Throughout the book poems provide a detailed description of the hardships of Theresienstadt, including hunger, forced labour, loneliness and the difficulty of getting up in the morning. These details, Schwertfeger claimed, are typical of women’s writing and display the manner in which they examine their surroundings.¹¹

The emphasis in Schwertfeger’s volume is on women, but Sara Horowitz, a central figure in literature for research of the Holocaust, commented: ‘Our task is to examine women not only as objects of particular abuses, as developers of particular survival strategies, or even as thinkers about their own experiences. We must examine the place of gender in accounts of men as well as those of women.’¹² She warns against reading women’s writing as a separate corpus without connecting it to and comparing it with the literary works produced by men, and this scholarship would ignore experiences that were common to men and women, and which were present in women’s testimonies and literary writings.

I opened my discussion with literary study of the Holocaust since the literary corpus includes not only fiction and poetry, but also diaries and other contemporaneous writings and memoirs written after the war. Since such writings are central to historical research as well, a dialogue has developed between the two disciplines.¹³ Sidra Ezrahi, among the first to take part in that dialogue, has maintained that comprehension of Holocaust literature is dependent upon broad knowledge of the historical context.¹⁴

Historiography

I will focus on Jews and will only comment briefly on non-Jewish German women. The historical controversy over the role of German women in the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis and their support of the regime and its criminality precedes discussions about the victims.

The American historian Claudia Koonz maintains that non-Jewish German women, in general, helped their husbands separate the public from the private sphere and in this way supported the silence about the crimes committed by Nazism, including the Final Solution. Moreover, she claims that by such behaviour they became direct accomplices in the crimes. The policy of the regime stressed the role of women as homemakers who were to produce healthy babies and be faithful to their men. The Nazi women’s organization, headed by Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, directed women to avoid questioning their husbands about work when at home; wives were supposed to provide the tired and troubled men with a peaceful home setting.¹⁵

In contrast, Gisela Bock, who studied the history of women in Germany and Europe from a cultural feminist approach, maintains that non-Jewish German women were also victims of the regime.¹⁶ The regime penetrated vulgarly into the private sphere, imposing its racial policy through the use of denunciations, and thus the declared separation of the private from the public spheres became invalid: ‘All Germans were responsible for the Holocaust, but not in their specific identities as women or men, and not because of their marital state, motherhood, or fatherhood.’¹⁷

The main point of Bock’s analysis is that non-Jewish German women were part of the Nazi regime in all capacities, as perpetrators, bystanders and victims. Women were part of the concentration and death-camp echelons, though never in the highest positions of command.

In view of the above, the study of everyday life and the reaction of grass-root Germans to the regime’s racial vision became an important field into which gender was integrated.¹⁸ This research combined social and cu...

Table of contents

• Writing the Holocaust
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: Gender: Writing Women, Writing the Holocaust
• 2: Cinematic Representations of the Holocaust
• 3: Sociology
• 4: The Psychiatric Treatment of Holocaust Survivors, or, the Tribulations of a Syndrome
• 5: Theology
• 6: Jews, Jewish Studies and Holocaust Historiography
• 7: The Holocaust and the Limits of Psychoanalysis: The Case of Bruno Bettelheim
• 8: Comparative Genocide
• 9: The Body
• 10: The Ethics of Representation in Holocaust Museums
• Index