Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Narratives: Towards a
Theory of Transgenerational Empathy
Submitted by Lewis Ward to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in English, September 2008.
This thesis is available for library use on the understanding that it is copyright material
and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper
acknowledgment.
I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and
that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree
by this or any other University.
……………………………...…….
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Abstract
What is the relationship between writing in the present and the traumatic historical
events that form the subject of that writing? What narrative strategies do authors
employ in order to negotiate the ethical and epistemological problems raised by this gap
in time and experience?
“Trauma theory” is undermined by clinical controversies and contradictory claims for
“literal truth” and “incomprehensibility”. Similarly, the Holocaust has been considered
inherently unrepresentable unless by those who witnessed it, leading to a false
opposition between genres of “testimony” and “fiction”. A way out of these dead ends
is to consider the role of the first-person narrator in contemporary Holocaust narratives.
While use of this device risks an inappropriate level of identification with those whose
experience is both extreme and unknowable, I argue that this problem may be resolved
to an extent through “transgenerational empathy”, an approach to the past that is selfreflexive, incorporates ideas of time, memory and generations, and moves both towards
and away from the victims of the past in a simultaneous gesture of proximity and
distance. For this theory I draw on Dominick LaCapra’s definitions of empathy and
“empathic unsettlement”, and on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concept of the “fusion of
horizons” between past and present.
Transgenerational empathy involves giving equal weight to “memory” and “history”.
An over-emphasis on memory leads to narratives that are merely identificatory, such as
Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces and Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments. In contrast,
W. G. Sebald’s use of a narrative persona in The Emigrants and Austerlitz enables
transgenerational empathy in narrative by simultaneously imposing layers of distance
while establishing close personal connection. Similarly, Jonathan Safran Foer’s thirdgeneration aesthetic of “post-postmemory” in Everything is Illuminated uses a “dual
persona” device to foreground empathically the abyss at the heart of any attempt to
recapture the past. My analysis of these authors draws on the writings of Gillian Rose,
Paul Ricoeur, Marianne Hirsch and Jacques Derrida. However, the concept of
“transgenerational empathy” would benefit from further research, both in terms of its
“temporal dimension” and the use of narrative personae by other contemporary authors
such as Philip Roth.
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Table of Contents
Abstract
..2
Table of Contents
..3
Acknowledgements
..4
Introduction: Holocaust memory and the ethics of representation
..5
1 Moving beyond notions of literal truth and the belated sublime: the
historical, political and clinical controversies of trauma
..31
2 Resolving the problems of identification: LaCapra, Gadamer, selfreflexivity and transgenerational empathy
..58
3 The consequences of promoting memory over history: identification and
deception in Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces and Binjamin
Wilkomirski’s Fragments
..82
4 A simultaneous gesture of proximity and distance: the empathic narrative
persona in W. G. Sebald’s “Paul Bereyter” and Austerlitz
..117
5 “An act of replacement”: duality, post-postmemory and absence in
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated
..149
Conclusion: the future of transgenerational empathy
..174
Works cited
..178
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Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank my inspirational and supportive supervisor,
Anthony Fothergill, and my kind yet rigorous examiners, Dr Philip Schwyzer and
Professor Sue Vice. The Department of English at Exeter provided both financial
assistance and a deep well of advice and encouragement; I am particularly grateful to Dr
Ana Vadillo, Professor Rick Rylance, Professor Regenia Gagnier, Dr Dan North, Dr Jo
Gill and Professor Helen Taylor. I am also indebted to Dr Shani Rousso, Roger Pitt,
Alice Barnaby and Simon Whalley for their comments on work in progress, and to
Lesley Williams and Dr Ali Judd for proof reading at such short notice. My parents,
Andy and Gwyneth Ward, provided vital support (yet again), which I hope one day to
repay. Finally, I extend my profound gratitude to Liz Jones for her tireless listening,
forensic close reading and unflinching belief.
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Introduction: Holocaust memory and the ethics of representation
It is now over sixty years since the end of World War II. Yet prose narratives (not to
mention other art-forms) continue to address the traumatic events of the middle of the
twentieth century. Within this literature, a sub-genre of “contemporary Holocaust
narratives” may be provisionally identified. Texts in this group often acknowledge their
temporal and generational distance from the event by thematizing memory in a selfreflexive manner. Indeed, the subject of these narratives is often not so much the
Holocaust itself, but the tension inherent in the act of “remembering” an event so far
from the writer’s experience which nevertheless provokes a powerful feeling of
proximity in the form of emotional response to the suffering of victims.
Thinking about this situation of contemporary literature generates several questions.
What is the relationship between writing in the present and the traumatic historical
events that form the subject of that writing? How is this gap in time and experience
negotiated in narratives that deal with events from previous generations? What
strategies do authors employ in these situations, and by what imperatives are they
guided?
The work on trauma and testimony that emerged in the United States in the 1990s
provides a starting point for answering these questions. For example, the model in
which the victim of a traumatic event testifies in the presence of a listener or therapist
might be considered suggestive for narrative (as Felman and Laub argue in their
landmark publication Testimony: Crises in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History
[1992]). However, this approach raises two central problems. First, the listener in this
situation risks over-identification with the other, which may lead to development of a
secondary trauma, and a consequent loss of critical judgement. Second, inherent to the
process is a controversial presumption that healing or redemption is the likely or
desirable result of talking and remembering. If an analogy is made between this listener
and an author who chooses to write about traumatic events that he or she did not endure
or witness, the problems of over-identification and healing would appear to be endemic
to Holocaust literature.
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Despite this connection, however, it is not clear that the application of trauma theory to
narrative will adequately answer the questions set out above. In Chapter 1 of this study
I investigate trauma in terms both of its material history and its history as a concept.
Though highly suggestive, the tenets of trauma theory are nevertheless undermined by
their reliance on certain ideas of memory based on apparently observable phenomena. I
argue that these notions, which include “belatedness” and a belief in the “literal” truth
of traumatic recall, are inappropriate tools for evaluating contemporary Holocaust
narratives. Moreover, trauma theory is both politically determined and clinically
controversial. This is not to say that it cannot generate useful formal analysis of
contemporary writing, with Anne Whitehead’s Trauma Fiction (2004) being the
exemplar in this regard. However, I seek to build on this work and ask whether another
model might be more helpful in understanding the relationship of writing in the present
to the traumatic events of the past. In Chapter 2 I propose to activate for literary study
the historian Dominick LaCapra’s notions of empathy and empathic unsettlement,
which connote acknowledgement of one’s affective response to the suffering of
history’s victims while retaining a level of objectivity that preserves the alterity of the
other. I analyse this in relation to identification, which as Robert Eaglestone and others
have pointed out is a central problem of the discourses of trauma and the Holocaust.
With reference to Gadamer’s notion of the “fusion of horizons”, I propose that
LaCaprian empathy in prose narrative can be usefully defined as a simultaneous gesture
of proximity and distance. I add the term “transgenerational” to empathy to indicate the
dimensions of time and memory that are typically foregrounded in narratives by later
generations.
A further dimension to the debate, and one which corresponds to an extent with the
model of proximity and distance, is the vexed relation between memory and history. In
Chapter 3, I situate Binjamin Wilkomirski’s false memoir Fragments (1995) and Anne
Michaels’ poetic novel Fugitive Pieces (1996) in the context of the memory/history
debate that has permeated critical discourse in the humanities since the 1980s. I argue
that Wilkomirski and Michaels’ texts over-privilege memory to the extent that they
merely identify rather than empathize with the Holocaust victims they depict. For this
analysis I broadly align memory with affect, identification and proximity, and history
with intellect, objectivity and distance, to demonstrate again that these false oppositions
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should be broken down to enable an empathic gesture that acknowledges the value of
both.
In Chapter 4 I argue that such a gesture is achieved in exemplary fashion in the work of
W. G. Sebald, with particular reference to the “Paul Bereyter” section of The Emigrants
(1993) and the longer narrative Austerlitz (2001). These generically hybrid prose works
take an oblique approach to the Holocaust through themes of exile, memory and loss.
My focus is on Sebald’s unusual use of a narrator who has some biographical
correspondence with the author and who takes part in the action, a figure I define as the
“empathic narrative persona”. This device is crucial to what I argue is Sebald’s project
of self-reflexively foregrounding the process of LaCaprian empathy, in which he
simultaneously imposes layers of narrative distance while establishing close personal
connection with his damaged protagonists. The analysis in this chapter will further
clarify the particular meaning of empathy being used in the present study. In the
Sebaldian narrator’s case, it consists of a refusal to “imagine” or “picture” the suffering
of others, while nevertheless “working through” the inevitable affective emotions raised
by our knowledge of them, in a consistent and convincing rejection of identification.
This conclusion is reached with the help of the analysis by Sebald scholars Anne Fuchs
and J. J. Long, in particular their emphasis on the writer’s self-reflexive technique, and
through the critique of Holocaust representation advanced by the philosopher Gillian
Rose in Mourning Becomes the Law (1996).
In Chapter 5 I turn to the very different approach to the Holocaust taken by Jonathan
Safran Foer in Everything is Illuminated (2002). This experimental and semiautobiographical novel addresses themes of generational memory, family secrets, and
the ethical relation of the present to the past, through a combination of travel narrative,
epistolary interludes and magical realism. Foer himself has called his novel less an “act
of creation” than an “act of replacement”. In this chapter I evaluate how far this act
constitutes an empathic relation to the past. I consider several contextual elements,
including contemporary Holocaust debates in the United States (Foer’s country of
origin), and the “Yizkor” books of Jewish remembrance that serve as a contrast with
Foer’s re-imagining of history. I also investigate the relevance to my thesis of Marianne
Hirsch’s notion of “postmemory”, first described in Family Frames: Photography,
Narrative and Postmemory (1997), and of Paul Ricoeur’s theory of historical fiction, as
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put forward in Time and Narrative (1988). Finally, I consider Jacques Derrida’s insight
that presence is always deferred in an “infinite chain” of “supplements”. Using these
contextual and theoretical models, I argue that Foer’s novel self-reflexively foregrounds
the problems of memory through its narrative structure. While a version of the author
enters the novel in person, establishing a deeply felt bloodline connection to his
ancestors, his failed quest is narrated by another, thus providing objective distance
through trenchant criticisms. This “dual persona” device forms a chain of Derridean
supplements or “replacements” that gestures to the inevitable absence at the heart of any
attempt to recapture the past. Foer’s third-generation aesthetic of “post-postmemory”
thus achieves a degree of empathy by revealing the abyss at the heart of any attempt at
transgenerational identification.
Finally, in a brief conclusion I suggest some possible avenues of further research into
the question of transgenerational empathy. I introduce the topic of what might be
termed the “temporal dimension” to the gesture of proximity and distance. I also
suggest Philip Roth as another author who both makes use of personae in narrative and
addresses the traumatic past, particularly in his novel The Plot Against America (2004).
Roth, unlike Sebald and Foer, was alive during World War II, and therefore occupies an
interesting position of geographical distance and personal memory which could be used
to broaden the scope of my concept of transgenerational empathy in narrative.
In the remainder of this Introduction I provide context for the thesis outlined above.
First I discuss the ethical and epistemological debates surrounding Holocaust
representation. Secondly, I evaluate other recent approaches to my topic and show how
my thesis adds to these contributions. Finally, I define the parameters of “contemporary
Holocaust narratives” with reference to the history of literature on the subject, other
attempts to organize the field, and further examples of recent prose narratives not
discussed in the main body of the thesis.
I begin, however, with an example from outside the category of Holocaust literature.
Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001) deals with other historical events of that time:
the British retreat to (and from) Dunkirk in 1940, and the subsequent overwhelming
numbers of wounded arriving in English hospitals. McEwan drew on two major
sources: the tales told by his father, a former soldier who made the journey from
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wartime France to hospital bed in Liverpool; and the written memoir of novelist and
wartime nurse Lucilla Andrews, No Time for Romance (1977). When Andrews died in
2006, an article by Julia Langdon in the Mail on Sunday accused McEwan of profiting
from the memoir without due tribute to its author. Plagiarism could not be explicitly
alleged, as McEwan had acknowledged the source at the end of his novel. However, it
was implied in the title of the Mail’s piece, “Revealed: how Booker prize writer copied
work of the queen of hospital romance”, and in a “spot the difference” section showing
similar extracts from the two works. After several notable writers rallied to McEwan’s
cause, pointing out that all historical novels rely on factual material, Langdon retreated,
saying that she had only accused McEwan of lacking “simple courtesy and professional
etiquette” (48). The affair soon subsided.
However, the events were revisited in Critical Quarterly the following summer. In his
Foreword to “The McEwan Dossier”, Colin McCabe reflected on the implications of
such accusations of plagiarism:
McEwan’s novel raises the question of the writer’s relation to ‘borrowed words’
in a particularly acute fashion because it is explicitly a historical novel set before
the writer was born. Borrowing here does not simply involve the inevitable
traces left by others’ writing and speech, but the necessity for the writer to
anchor his or her narrative in the specificities of an age unknown at first hand.
(32)
While this “necessity” is arguable, it seems appropriate in this case, given McEwan’s
own response to Langdon’s initial article. Writing in The Guardian (and reprinted in
Critical Quarterly), McEwan explains that Andrews’ memoir is, to his knowledge, the
only written eye-witness account available on the subject of nurses’ experience during
the influx of Dunkirk veterans in 1940. He argues that such events “demand the
strictest factual accuracy. When all these elements are 60 years in the past, the quest for
truth becomes all the more difficult and important” (qtd. in McCabe 47-8). Beyond
veracity, however, McEwan also makes assertions about the ethical responsibility of
writing and the nature of this “truth”:
It is an eerie, intrusive matter, inserting imaginary characters into actual
historical events. A certain freedom is suddenly compromised; as one crosses
and re-crosses the lines between fantasy and the historical record, one feels a
weighty obligation to strict accuracy. In writing about wartime especially, it
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seems like a form of respect for the suffering of a generation wrenched from
their ordinary lives to be conscripted into a nightmare.
The writer of a historical novel may resent his dependence on the written record,
on memoirs and eyewitness accounts, in other words on other writers, but there
is no escape: Dunkirk or a wartime hospital can be novelistically realised, but
they cannot be re-invented. (46-7)
This idea of an inherent constraint to the process of writing is echoed by the novelist
Sarah Waters. Waters compares McEwan’s situation to her own experience writing The
Night Watch (2006), which is set in London during World War II bombing, arguing that
“there is a natural limit to the ways in which one can describe, say, an air raid, or
driving an ambulance through the Blitz, or queuing for rationed food” (qtd. in McCabe
58). Waters acknowledges that such scruples did not arise when writing her other
novels, which are set in the nineteenth century. Similarly, McEwan does not hesitate to
create the thoughts of a thirteen-year-old girl in pre-war England – the subject of the
first part of Atonement - though such experience is just as far from his own as that of a
soldier or nurse. Of course, a large part of this distinction is about reverence for facts;
Dunkirk and the Blitz are real historical events, and therefore, McEwan writes, “cannot
be re-invented”. But the views of McEwan and Waters also reveal an underlying ethics
of representation in which events involving traumatic experiences carry a particular
moral weight. McEwan’s desire to show “respect for the suffering of a generation”
means that he refuses to try to imagine what it was like, instead only consenting to write
about such events if he has eye-witness accounts on which to draw. Another important
example is Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy (1991-5), which similarly draws on the
author’s careful research of first-hand testimonial accounts in its fictionalization of shell
shock victims in World War I.
This dimension of personal ethics is an important component of the problem of
Holocaust representation. The debate over whether such representation is desirable,
permissible, or even possible is usually traced back to Theodor Adorno’s
pronouncement in 1951 that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (“Cultural
Criticism” 34). Though Adorno later modified his stance, at least as far as survivorpoets were concerned, conceding that “Perennial suffering has as much right to
expression as a tortured man has to scream” (“Meditations” 362), the suspicion of art in
the face of the Holocaust has continued. George Steiner, for example, wrote in 1966
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that the only response to the dilemma should be a conscious, deliberate silence: “It is
better for the poet to mutilate his own tongue than to dignify the inhuman either with his
gift or his uncaring” (“Silence” 73).
Of course, such pronouncements have had little effect on the amount of Holocaust
literature produced. Lawrence Langer’s The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination
(1975) brought together and illuminated the many novels on the subject that had by then
appeared, convincingly arguing for the crucial role of fiction in making the Holocaust
comprehensible for the human imagination. For Langer, the novel form’s inherent
blend of fact and fantasy, what he calls its “irrealism” (45), is exactly appropriate for
depicting events that are often scarcely believable. This argument is in direct opposition
to the idea that the Holocaust is intrinsically resistant to fictional representation, a view
put forward by, for example, the philosopher Berel Lang in Act and Idea in the Nazi
Genocide (1990). For Lang, the problem stems from the perceived nature of the events:
On the account given, imaginative representation would personalize even events
that are impersonal and corporate; it would dehistoricize and generalize events
that occur specifically and contingently. And the unavoidable dissonance here is
evident. [. . .] where impersonality and abstractness are essential features of the
subject, as in the subject of the Nazi genocide, then a literary focus on
individuation and agency ‘contradicts’ the subject itself [. . .]. (144-5)
Lang’s argument rests on a distinction between “figurative” and “historical” discourse.
He says that the writer of figurative discourse, in addition to emphasising the individual
agency of characters, inevitably “obtrudes” (145) into the narrative, giving his or her
own perspective, thereby implying that alternative perspectives are also possible. This
is unacceptable to Lang because in the case of the Holocaust there must be a limit to the
possible range of viewpoints:
The figurative assertion of alternative possibilities, in other words, suggests a
denial of limitation: no possibilities are excluded. And although for some
literary subjects openness of this sort may be warranted or even desirable, for
others it represents a falsification, morally and conceptually. (145-6, emphasis in
original)
This focus on the ethical limits of representation (reminiscent of Sarah Waters’ assertion
that “there is a natural limit to the ways one can describe”) is connected to the view that
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the Holocaust is itself a “limit event”, that is, one that stretches or even exceeds our
ability to understand or know it. This argument in turn stems from the assertion that the
Holocaust was unprecedented, singular, and unique. The historian Eberhard Jäckel has
succinctly summarized why this should be so:
The Nazi extermination of the Jews was unique because never before had a state,
under the responsible authority of its leader, decided and announced that a
specific group of human beings, including the old, the women, the children, and
the infants, would be killed to the very last one, and implemented this decision
with all the means at its disposal. (Qtd. in LaCapra, “Representing” 1121)
Another historian, Saul Friedländer, agrees, calling the Holocaust an “event at the
limits” whose nature was “wilful, systematic, industrially organised” (“Introduction” 3).
These references to industrial and bureaucratic implementation also suggest that the
Holocaust was a product of modernity, an argument made explicit by Zygmunt Bauman
in 1989. Bauman insisted that
the Holocaust was not simply a Jewish problem, and not an event in Jewish
history alone. The Holocaust was born and executed in our modern rational
society, at the high stage of our civilization and at the peak of human cultural
achievement, and for this reason it is a problem of that society, civilization and
culture. (x, emphasis in original)
Going beyond such socio-historic analyses, others have argued that the Holocaust’s
uniqueness challenges or reveals the very nature of humanity. Hannah Arendt’s
description of the “banality of evil” in her report on the Eichmann trial is an early
example. More recently, Jürgen Habermas has articulated the sense that the human
condition has been altered by Auschwitz:
Something happened there that no one could previously have thought even
possible. It touched a deep layer of solidarity among all who have a human face.
Until then - in spite of all the quasi-natural brutalities of world history - we had
simply taken the integrity of this deep layer for granted. At that point a bond of
naiveté was torn to shreds - a naiveté from which unquestioned traditions drew
their authority, a naiveté that as such had nourished historical continuities.
Auschwitz altered the conditions for the continuation of historical life contexts and not only in Germany. (251-2)
LaCapra gives the original source as Eberhard Jäckel, “Die elende Praxis der Untersteller” in Die Zeit,
12 Sept. 1986.
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Such ideas of ontological rupture and unprecedented uniqueness have strong
implications for the epistemology of representation. In the postmodern philosophy of
Jean-François Lyotard, particularly Heidegger and “the jews” (1990), the Holocaust
becomes that which is ineffable, inexpressible, and hence beyond representation in the
normal understanding of the term. Ann Parry sums up Lyotard’s view, in which the
Holocaust takes on the “immemorial” status of the originary repressed: “it is a silence,
lost to representation. Writing beyond the Shoah is ‘outside taste’ [. . .] reason and
ethics have been negated, so purgation and renewal are impossible [. . .]. All art can do
is struggle with and bear witness to the unsayable” (420).
Gillian Rose criticises this approach as leading to “Holocaust piety” (43), which she
argues represents a collusion with Fascism where there should instead be an
“acknowledgement of [our] mutual implication” (41). Rose writes:
To argue for silence, prayer, the banishment equally of poetry and knowledge, in
short, the witness of ‘ineffability’, that is, non-representability, is to mystify
something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too
understandable, all too continuous with what we are – human, all too human.
(43, emphasis in original)
The conflict between the views of such thinkers as Lyotard and Rose has led to various
binary theories of Holocaust representation being put forward. For example, Michael
Rothberg, in Traumatic Realism (2000), posits an opposition between “realist” and
“antirealist” approaches:
By realist I mean both an epistemological claim that the Holocaust is knowable
and a representational claim that this knowledge can be translated into a familiar
mimetic universe. [. . .]. By antirealist I mean both a claim that the Holocaust is
not knowable or would be knowable only under radically new regimes of
knowledge and that it cannot be captured in traditional representational
schemata. (3-4)
Alan Mintz, in an article published in the same year, proposes an opposition between
“exceptionalist” and “constructivist” views. The exceptionalist standpoint is “rooted in
a conviction of the Holocaust as a radical rupture in human history that goes well
beyond notions of uniqueness” (401), while the constructivists stress “the cultural lens
through which the Holocaust is perceived” (402). This idea that some commentators
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are more “constructive” than others takes even more polemical form in Sidra DeKoven
Ezrahi’s analysis, in 1996, of the stultifying effect of resistance to interpretation and
representation. Ezrahi uses the terms “absolutist” and “relativist”, noting that in
writings about the Holocaust, “History is appropriated either as a set of documents
frozen in time and providing the locus that articulates the Event itself or yielding to
ongoing interpretative and narrative enterprises”. While the absolutist camp sets limits
to representation, the relativists’ challenges to these restrictions “arise from the principle
of desire and change as a counterforce to the rituals and myths that freeze memory”
(135). Thus Ezrahi implies two things: firstly, that any limits, such as to what can or
cannot be said about the experiences of victims, are problematic insofar as they tend
towards reinforcing a frozen stasis that obstructs the process of mourning; and secondly,
that writing should be creatively experimental to the extent that it achieves change,
progress and movement, in defiance of the “collective enforcement of propriety over the
past” (136) that the absolutists would impose.
Thus the debate becomes one between movement and resistance, freedom and
constriction. Fiction, in this context, has drawn criticism for its tendency to encourage
free movement across boundaries. In Between Witness and Testimony (2001), Michael
Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer argue that fictional narrative tends towards
redemption, whether through identification with the protagonists of the story or by
gaining knowledge of the event being narrated. For these authors, neither of these
outcomes is possible in the case of the Holocaust, which “exceeds our ability to identify
with or come to know [it]” (ix). In similar vein, Robert Eaglestone, in The Holocaust
and the Postmodern (2004), places the problem of identification at the centre of the
debate, arguing that “the reading that fiction requires too often demands the sort of
process of identification that ‘consumes’ the events” (132).
I deal with Eaglestone’s arguments in detail in Chapter 2 of the present study. For now
it will suffice to draw attention to the way Bernard-Donals, Glejzer and Eaglestone
focus on ideas of resistance, whether of writers to the subject, or of the Holocaust to
attempts to fictionalize it. The problem with this approach is that it is in one sense a lost
cause. Countless examples of Holocaust narratives already exist, and for better or
worse, they influence our view of the event. As James E. Young argued as long ago as
1988, “What is remembered of the Holocaust depends on how it is remembered, and
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how events are remembered depends in turn on the texts now giving them form” (1).
Thus, for Young, books being written now represent whatever meaning the Holocaust
has; there is no underlying objective truth for which to search, no locus of absolute
Event to be discovered. Sweeping aside Ezrahi’s “absolutists”, this approach frees
narrative fiction from its chains of attachment to the historical past. If, as Young
implies, the text gives form to the memory (literally creates it), then any “limits” to its
scope can only be textual, not epistemological. In this model, what Berel Lang saw as
the inherent problem of “falsification” through the suggestion of alternative perspectives
is removed, and the writer is at liberty to explore the theme of the Holocaust in
“limitless” creative ways. While Young does not explicitly advocate this, it is the
logical result of his important insight that representation and reality exist not in an
oppositional or hierarchical relationship but a symbiotic one.
Another argument in support of alternative perspectives is put forward by Michael
André Bernstein in Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (1994).
Bernstein is motivated by a desire to respect the particular moral universe inhabited by
Holocaust victims, and avoid imposing retrospective judgement upon them. He
criticizes a narrative move he labels “backshadowing”, which “is a kind of retroactive
foreshadowing, in which the shared knowledge of the outcome of a series of events by a
narrator and listener is used to judge the participants in those events as though they too
should have known what was to come” (16, emphasis in original). Bernstein gives the
example of Aharon Appelfeld’s novel Badenheim 1939 (1980), in which, Bernstein
argues, the Jewish characters appear to be judged for not anticipating their fate. In
contrast, Bernstein advocates “sideshadowing”, a narrative strategy which emphasizes
the individual contingencies and motivations behind each act or decision, rather than
submission to a pre-determined teleology. Sideshadowing, then, consists of “gesturing
to the side, to a present dense with multiple, and mutually exclusive, possibilities for
what is to come” (1).
Bernstein’s argument is a practical recommendation for how the Holocaust may be
represented. Another is implied by Eric Santner’s warning against “narrative
fetishism”, which is “the construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or
unconsciously designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called the
narrative into being in the first place” (144). Santner’s examples include the diverting
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love stories in the German television series Heimat, and the uplifting ending of
Schindler’s List (1993). A solution to this problem is proposed by Gillian Rose, who
argues that the desired effect on an audience should not be the “sentimental tears”
provoked by Spielberg’s film, but “the dry eyes of a deep grief” (54). This is to be
achieved by combining the “fascism of representation” with the “representation of
Fascism” (41). In another approach, Saul Friedländer has attempted to define what
might constitute “adequacy” in Holocaust representation. Citing Ida Fink’s short stories
and Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985), Friedländer finds a “common
denominator”, which is
the exclusion of straight, documentary realism, but the use of some sort of
allusive or distanced realism. Reality is there, in its starkness, but perceived
through a filter: that of memory (distance in time), that of spatial displacement,
that of some sort of narrative margin which leaves the unsayable unsaid.
(“Introduction” 17, emphasis in original)
I return to Rose and Friedländer’s arguments in Chapter 4 of the present study, where I
apply them to the work of W. G. Sebald.
Meanwhile, yet another example of a recommendation for Holocaust representation
comes from Geoffrey Hartman:
Art can and does move away from historical reference by a characteristic
distancing. Moreover, even so estranging an event as the Shoah may have to be
estranged again, through art, insofar as its symbols become trite and ritualistic
rather than realising. (“Introduction” 19)
This process of “distancing” and “estrangement” will necessarily require experiment
and risk, and in the first book-length study of recent novels on the subject, Holocaust
Fiction (2000), Sue Vice argues forcefully in favour of such an approach to narrative.
Discussing the reasons for the “scandal[ized]” (2) critical reception to much Holocaust
fiction, Vice argues that reviewers and scholars often mistakenly apply the rules of
testimony or memoir to the genre. One of these supposed rules is that the biography of
the author must stand up to scrutiny; the author must have “authority”. Another is that
one only has the “right” to approach the subject if one is Jewish or related to a survivor.
Vice says that these rules of testimony should not be applied to fiction, arguing that “it
is important to understand the view which values testimony over all fictional genres for
17
what it is – an estimate based on non-literary criteria, and it is precisely those criteria
with which I am concerned here” (7). This frees Vice to consider various novels in
terms of their literary merit, using the tools of Bakhtinian poetics. She criticizes
Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces for “trying to wring aesthetic and meaningful comfort from
an event which offers no redemption of any kind” (9). Instead Vice favours novels
which “push to [extremes] their novelistic constituents” (8). Holocaust fiction, for Vice,
should be “unaccommodating” to the reader, producing an effect of “disruption and
unease” (161). She goes further by giving fiction a licence to take any kind of risk: “By
contrast to the poetic option, I argue that crude narration, irony, black humour,
appropriation, sensationalism, even characters who mouth antisemitic slogans, do not
seem as suspect” (9). The point for Vice is to avoid soothing the reader with certain
kinds of style and instead use experimentation to provoke feelings of unsettlement that
in turn force the reader to engage more directly with the subject-matter.
Vice’s careful separation of the “genres” of testimony and fiction echoes a concern
across much critical writing about the Holocaust. For example, Gillian Banner, in
Holocaust Literature: Schulz, Levi, Spiegelman and the Memory of the Offence (2000),
addresses the problem as it is raised by the three authors in her title. She acknowledges
that Schulz’s fictions contain elements of autobiography, and that Levi and
Spiegelman’s autobiographical narratives contain aspects of fiction. Despite the
evidence of this cross-pollination, Banner insists that boundaries must be maintained,
and asserts that this may be achieved by assessing (authorial) “intention”:
As good postmodernists, we all recognize the fictionalizing and shaping that
take place in any ‘true’ story and would assert that no telling is free of the
editing and narrating that also goes to make fiction. In this view Schulz’s stories
are likely to be autobiographical to the extent that Levi’s memoir is fictional. I
would argue that whilst these ideas are not only persuasive but also beneficial in
approaches to most other literature, they do present dangers when applied to the
literature of the Holocaust. The tendency to relativism which counts Sophie's
Choice and If This is a Man as equally ‘fictitious’ or ‘true’ does a disservice in
the case of this particular genre. [. . .]. [. . .] when reading the literature of the
Holocaust, the distinctions between those texts which are intended as fictions
and those which are not, need to be recognized and maintained. (5).
The problem with this argument is that it relies on a strict “distinction” between fiction
and non-fiction that, as Banner acknowledges, is not borne out in narrative practice.
18
The twin assertions that texts do cross the divide and that the barrier must be maintained
cannot be simultaneously sustained. Moreover, whether a text is labelled fiction or nonfiction results not just from the author’s stated “intention” (which may or may not be
trustworthy or relevant) but also from the editorial and marketing decisions of
publishers. Neither of these criteria are particularly satisfactory, particularly when
addressing such an urgent question as the ethics of Holocaust narrative. Instead, it may
be more productive to acknowledge that the supposed boundaries between testimony
and fiction, historical and figurative discourse, referentiality and imaginative
construction, (auto)biography and invention, have been routinely breached throughout
the history of prose narrative. In this study, I wish to avoid these artificial boundaries
and reductive opposites to analyse instead a range of texts for the ethical positions
revealed by their various narrative strategies in approaching the Holocaust. These
positions may be most effectively elucidated, in my view, by evaluating the role of the
narrator in each text. Wilkomirski’s ‘I’ not only claims to remember a past that is not
his, but also sets out to deceive the reader as to its function within the text. Michaels’
narrators promote over-identification with victims and alignment of those born after
with genuine witnesses. Sebald, in contrast, constructs what I call an “empathic
narrative persona” in order to negotiate such ethical problems, while Foer’s approach
includes a “dual persona” whose function is to foreground the irrecoverable
epistemological and generational distance between past and present. By thus examining
the relationships between author, narrator and text, I argue that the dead ends of
authority and authenticity, which stem from false oppositions based on genre and which
result in either condemnation or acceptance into a “canon” of Holocaust literature, may
be transcended. Indeed, writers like Sebald and Foer self-reflexively foreground their
engagement with these problems, suggesting that the concerns of those who disapprove
of certain forms of Holocaust representation need not remain outside the narrative but
may be usefully integrated within the text itself. In doing so they also answer the ethical
concern about crossing the boundary between testimony and fiction by foregrounding
their use of elements from both genres.
Along with Vice and Banner’s interventions, there have been several other significant
contributions to the critical debate on contemporary Holocaust literature in the last
decade or so. Nicola King’s Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self (1999)
considers both fictional and biographical narratives in terms of the common way they
19
reveal the construction of identity. Taking examples from “women’s writing” and
popular fiction as well as Holocaust narratives, King’s thesis is that identity is
constructed through the “I”-narrator’s dialogue between present narration and past
experience, a process of “re-membering” or putting back together the two parts of the
self inhabiting these realms. This approach highlights the difference between the
narrating “I” and the subject of that narration, which are too often taken to be identical.
It also draws on the interest in memory and trauma that emerged in the 1990s, a field
which underlies Whitehead’s Trauma Fiction (2004). Among Whitehead’s examples
are several works dealing with the Holocaust: Fragments, Fugitive Pieces, Caryl
Phillips’ The Nature of Blood (1997), and selections from Sebald’s oeuvre. Whitehead
makes an explicit link between “trauma theory” and contemporary fiction, asserting that
each informs the other. Specifically, she invokes Cathy Caruth’s development of
Freud’s Nachträglichkeit theory into the concept of “belatedness” to account for
instances of nonlinear narrative and the presence of ghosts and haunting in recent fiction
(the exemplar being Toni Morrison’s Beloved). Whitehead also asserts that the “key
stylistic features” of trauma fiction, “intertextuality, repetition and a dispersed or
fragmented narrative voice” (84), imitate the workings of traumatic memory: “Novelists
have frequently found that the impact of trauma can only adequately be represented by
mimicking its forms and symptoms, so that temporality and chronology collapse, and
narratives are characterized by repetition and indirection” (3). Finally, Whitehead
shows how trauma fiction draws on both postmodernism – in its critique of grand
narratives, foregrounding of memory, and testing of formal boundaries – and on
postcolonialism – for her new category’s “concern with the recovery of memory and
acknowledgement of the denied, the repressed and the forgotten” (82). Trauma, for
Whitehead, is the dominant mode both of real-world experience and literary expression
at the turn of the century. In Chapter 1 of the present study I challenge some of the
tenets of trauma theory that underlie Whitehead’s thesis, including Caruthian
belatedness.
Another thesis drawing on trauma theory, this time in order to exclusively address
Holocaust representation, is proposed by Ernst van Alphen in Caught by History:
Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (1997). Van Alphen
invokes the more contentious assertion of Caruth and others that trauma represents a
literal truth about the past, unmediated by the usual distortions of memory. He writes:
20
“Whereas a memory is clearly distinct from the event being remembered – it is the
memory of something – in the case of trauma, reality and representation are inseparable.
There is no distinction: the representation is the event” (36). Combining this with
speech-act theory, van Alphen advances the argument that certain imaginative artworks
achieve “Holocaust effects” or performative “reenactments” which enable the audience
to “keep in touch” with the past in an unmediated manner. This act is a presentation
rather than representation. “When I call something a Holocaust effect, I mean to say that
we are not confronted with a representation of the Holocaust, but that we, as viewers or
readers, experience directly a certain aspect of the Holocaust or of Nazism, of that
which led to the Holocaust” (10). The twin problems highlighted by this approach – a
reliance on contested ideas about traumatic memory, and a tendency to over-identify
with the victims of the past – are explored in detail in the first two chapters of the
present study.
Rothberg’s Traumatic Realism provides a useful nuance to this debate. The new
category proposed by his title is described as not an “act of passive mimesis”, but rather
an “attempt to produce the traumatic event as an object of knowledge and to program
and thus transform its readers so that they are forced to acknowledge their relationship
to posttraumatic culture” (103). Thus Rothberg seems to argue that traumatic realism
“produce[s]” the event in the present rather than depicting it in the past, in an apparent
echo of van Alphen’s ideas of performative reenactment. Yet Rothberg’s only reference
to van Alphen’s book is to criticize its “vague and indefensible assertions about the
relationship of art to historical events” (277), and to argue that “the notion that ‘we’ can
reexperience the Holocaust is absurd and dangerous” (278). This is because Rothberg’s
concern is more pedagogic than personal. While van Alphen’s impetus is his own
childhood memory of stifled debate in post-war Holland, Rothberg appears motivated
by a desire to “program” readers with knowledge. This didactic impulse leads to an
attempt to corral the various movements of literary history into a productive
combination. In Rothberg’s tripartite schema, Holocaust literature responds to “a
demand for documentation, a demand for reflection on the formal limits of
representation, and a demand for the risky public circulation of discourses on the
events” (7). These three demands correspond in turn to realism (“strategies for referring
to and documenting the world”), modernism (which “questions its ability to document
history transparently”) and postmodernism (which “responds to the economic and
21
political conditions of its emergence and public circulation”) (9). “Traumatic realism”,
then, combines all three of these elements in variable amounts in order to respond to the
particular difficulties of Holocaust representation. Examples given by Rothberg include
works by Ruth Kluger, Art Spiegelman, and Philip Roth.
These monographs by Vice, Banner, King, van Alphen and Rothberg – not to mention
less theoretical examples such as Christopher Bigsby’s Remembering and Imagining the
Holocaust (2006) and Daniel R. Schwarz’s Imagining the Holocaust (1999) – have little
difficulty locating examples of “Holocaust literature” on which to comment. Yet their
examples almost exclusively originate from outside the location of the original event,
and more pointedly, from the dispersed victim population rather than the perpetrator
collective. In contrast, Ernestine Schlant’s The Language of Silence: West German
Literature and the Holocaust (1999) is a comprehensive chronological survey of postwar non-Jewish German authors who address the Holocaust, and as her title implies,
Schlant finds their output less than helpful. Drawing on Freud’s theories of melancholy
and mourning, Schlant argues that there is a “silence” in her objects of study which
results from an authorial strategy (perhaps unconscious) of avoidance and omission.
Because of this silence there has yet to be a proper “working through” by the German
people. The nature of the task Schlant feels is necessary is revealed in her analysis of
W. G. Sebald, whom she considers to have broken the pattern. In The Emigrants,
Schlant argues, Sebald “begins to mourn the destruction of Jews in Germany – a unique
achievement in German literature – and gives voice to the culture and the lives that were
destroyed. Here, the language of silence is broken and a long-delayed melancholy
emerges” (19).
Schlant’s analysis reveals the importance attached to the way those living many decades
later should “remember” the Holocaust and its victims. Some have argued that this
temporal and generational distance has turned out to be helpful for understanding.
Psychotherapist Dori Laub has posited a “historical gap” (“Event” 84) akin to the
latency experienced by some sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder, in which only
now can events previously met with silence be meaningfully apprehended. Similarly,
Saul Friedländer offers a Freudian explanation:
22
The “generation of the grandchildren”, mainly among Europeans (Germans in
particular) but among Jews as well, has sufficient distance from the events in
terms of both the sheer passage of time and the lack of personal involvement to
be able to confront the full impact of the past. Thus, the expansion of memory
of the Shoah could be interpreted as the gradual lifting, induced by the passage
of time, of collective repression. (“History” 274)
Friedländer’s argument brings together the twin concerns of the twentieth century’s
obsession with memory: the individual and the collective. Theories of the individual
psyche stem not just from Freudian psychoanalysis but also from the philosophy of
Henri Bergson and the literary innovations of Marcel Proust. Meanwhile, models of
“collective memory” have been developed since Maurice Halbwachs’ mid-century
interventions by historians such as Pierre Nora and cultural critics like Andreas Huyssen
(both of whom are dealt with in Chapter 3 of the present study). However, there are
several other dimensions to contemporary interest in memory. In answer to the
question of why people choose to remember a past in which they did not take part,
several answers present themselves. Jewish tradition and religious practice has always
emphasized both remembering the experience of one’s ancestors and understanding the
present as part of a continuum with the past (a tendency fondly satirized by Foer in
Everything is Illuminated, as I discuss in Chapter 5). In the wider community,
“Holocaust remembrance” is understood as an exhortation to “never forget”, which in
turn may help society avoid prejudice, persecution and genocide in the future. This
latter project includes the preservation of survivor testimony by such projects as the
Fortunoff Archive and the Shoah Foundation, and collective acts of remembrance such
as “Holocaust Memorial Day” and the visiting of Holocaust museums as part of
Western tourism.
Another important dimension of the contemporary negotiation with memory is its
relation to history. Richard Terdiman, in Present Past: Modernity and the Memory
Crisis (1993), argues that the recent obsession with memory is in effect a product of the
historical process of modernity. Elsewhere memory has been embraced as a model for
challenging history. In an article published in 2004, Meredith Criglington succinctly
describes this phenomenon:
Memory’s relative or chronotopic structure provides a critical model for
examining representations of the past. The shifting, mediated, and constructed
23
nature of memory challenges more traditional historiographic modes that tend to
appear static, transcendent, and naturalized. Close attention to the operation of
memory reminds us that all historical knowledge is relational, contingent, and
“situated” (Haraway); in other words, history is shaped according to our present
needs. Moreover, an awareness that memory is partial, in the double sense of
being incomplete and subjective, creates slippages and gaps through which
contesting voices, or even silences, can emerge. (130)
This potential of memory to generate new ways of thinking about the past has been a
strong influence on contemporary narratives of the Holocaust. It is one of the paradoxes
of Holocaust representation that those who cannot have direct memory of the event
nevertheless tend to draw on it as a central metaphor, symbol, or other generative device
for their narratives. This is certainly the case in the examples dealt with in the present
study, for which I will now attempt to define some categorical boundaries. While the
reductive nature of this must be acknowledged, it may nevertheless help to clarify my
overall thesis and provide grounding for the chapters that follow.
In the present study, then, I am considering post-1990 European and North American
Holocaust narratives, with a fictional element, by non-survivors. This last condition
seems to me the most significant. Given the insoluble difficulties, alluded to above, of
separating prose narratives into genres of, for example, “fiction” and “testimony”, the
distinction between survivor-witnesses and the rest is perhaps the only stable pillar left
for critics to hold on to. Indeed, this may explain why Fragments, with its author’s
claim to be a witness when historical documents prove that he cannot possibly have
been so, has been considered so important by critics (I sketch this response to the
“Wilkomirski affair” in Chapter 3). Meanwhile, my decision to exclude survivors from
my purview is also an inevitable result of privileging contemporary examples, with
most witnesses now having died. More importantly, accounts by survivor-witnesses
present their own particular problems regarding the boundaries between fact and fiction,
or testimony and imagination, that are beyond the scope of the present study. The
question of whether Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man or Elie Wiesel’s Night (both 1958)
contain fictional elements is very different from the issues raised by the generic
hybridity found in books by Sebald and Foer. Survivors may or may not fictionalize
their memories, consciously or unconsciously (and some would say inevitably); but they
nevertheless form a distinct group by dint of having any personal memory on which to
draw.
24
It is for similar reasons that I do not include examples from the burgeoning category of
“second generation” Holocaust narratives. This important group, examined in detail in
Efraim Sicher’s edited collection Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after
Auschwitz (1998), is usually restricted to books by authors whose parents were
Holocaust survivors. Thus while Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces deals with this topic,
it nevertheless would fall out of Sicher’s category by dint of its author’s parentage.
Elsewhere, in his Introduction to Holocaust Novelists (2004), Sicher has set out criteria
for this category based on the connection between an author’s biography, psychology
and output:
The second generation feels an urgent need to transmit the testimony of the
ageing survivors to the next generation, both as carriers of memory and as
fighters against Holocaust denial. The generational transfer of posttraumatic
memory has given children of survivors the feeling of being maimed by history
before their births, and they have had to come to terms with a past of which they
have no personal memory by imagining it creatively in novels, poetry and plays.
(“Introduction” xvii)
Sicher’s determining factor, “generational transfer of posttraumatic memory,” reflects a
widespread assumption that will be interrogated throughout the present study, especially
in Chapters 1 and 5. While such “transfer” is questionable, its acceptance in the critical
community leads me to set aside “second generation” novelists, along with survivorauthors, as having different claims to witness than those with no direct connection to the
Holocaust.
Among the dozens of examples of the “second generation” Sicher cites are Art
Spiegelman, Thane Rosenbaum, Melvin Jules Bukiet and David Grossman. While the
first three of these live and write in the United States, the presence of Grossman in the
list reveals a crossover between the categories of “second generation” and “Israeli
novelists”.2 Grossman’s See Under: Love (first published in Hebrew in 1986) is
probably the best-known work of fiction that articulates the particular situation of
growing up in postwar Israel with Holocaust survivors for parents. It is also
representative of a significant historical shift in Israeli literature in general, according to
2
It is of course also possible to distinguish (as Sicher does in The Holocaust Novel) between Israeli
writers and “Jewish-American post-Holocaust novelists” such as Saul Bellow.
25
the critic Gilead Morahg. In an article published in 1999, Morahg analyses the reasons
for the avoidance of the topic by Israeli authors in the first decades after the war.
Although a few novels appeared at this time, they tended to deal with the aftermath
rather than tackle the ghetto or camp. Morahg argues that “it is likely that the prolonged
absence of the Holocaust theme from the literature is not a manifestation of a general
national amnesia, but rather a specific consequence of a cultural code that controlled the
uses to which Holocaust references could be put” (459). This cultural code arose in part
from the difficulty of assimilating to a new country and the shame or guilt over having
survived. It also included the influence of “Zionist discourse”, which, Morahg writes,
did not deny the agony and the horror of the events of the Holocaust, but it did
deny the relevance of these events to the Israeli experience and the formation of
Israeli identity. And since Israeli literature was intensely preoccupied with
matters of Israeli experience and Israeli identity, the Holocaust was largely
excluded from its domain. It remained a dark and silent backdrop against which
a brilliant new reality was being etched. The first two generations of Israeli
writers implicitly denied their affinity with the murdered Jews of Europe by
insisting on an almost absolute difference from them. (459)
Thus, Morahg explains, the experience of survivor-witnesses became “sanctified”, and
for anyone else to describe such experience was “an intolerable violation of a sacred
taboo” (459). Once again the distinction between survivors and the rest is paramount.
The taboo was only broken when the children of survivors grew up to become writers
themselves. Morahg writes that since 1980, novelists have started to recognize the
importance of the Holocaust to contemporary Israeli experience. They record the
psychological damage and explore origins and consequences. Morahg cites, along with
Grossman, the writers Yitzhak Ben-Ner, Dorit Peleg and Itamar Levi. In their work he
finds a common element of Todorov’s “fantastic”, the juxtaposition of realist narrative
with fantastical elements, which Morahg judges fitting for the theme.
It is not only in Israel that non-realist modes of Holocaust fiction have become
increasingly prevalent. Daniel R. Schwarz, in Imagining the Holocaust (1999),
distinguishes four categories of writing on the topic: memoirs; realism; myth, parable
and fable; and fantasy. He argues that myth and fantasy come more to the fore as time
passes, and, like Morahg, that such approaches illuminate the theme. Efraim Sicher
agrees, arguing that “Imagination and fantasy need not necessarily impair authenticity”
26
(Holocaust Novel xiii). Nevertheless, another strand has evolved that prefers to ground
its fiction in fact. Jean-François Steiner’s Treblinka (1966), Anatolii Kusnetsov’s Babii
Yar (1967), Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark (1982) and Alexander Ramati’s And
The Violins Stopped Playing (1985) all purport to weave documented fact into narrative
fiction. Others, like John Hersey’s The Wall (1950), imitate the conventions of the
diary, adding an effect of verisimilitude. However, as shown by the discussion of Ian
McEwan’s Atonement above, these “historical”, “documentary” or “factional” novels
necessarily generate controversy. The choices they make in their use of historical
materials are always open to question, and their ethical stance in choosing to fictionalize
real people and events is likewise inherently contestable.
The final category typically offered by commentators on Holocaust literature is that of
the postmodern. We have already seen that critics like Whitehead and Rothberg
consider this to be a vital component of contemporary literatures of trauma. Sicher
argues that what he calls “postmodernist ‘Holocaust fictions’” are “not concerned with
historical descriptions of Nazi genocide, but with what it can suggest about the
postmodern aftermath, when delusions of liberal humanism have been shattered”
(Holocaust Novel 175). As such they may represent a response to or echo of the
postmodern view of the Holocaust itself, as put forward by Lyotard and others. Nicola
King notes that postmodernism’s characteristic challenge to traditional views of history
and truth risks a dangerous level of relativism, yet also provides a productive
perspective for addressing the representational challenges inherent in the Holocaust
itself. She writes:
Postmodern fiction thus interrogates the memory of the Holocaust in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and, through its circulation in popular
culture, breaks the “limits of representation” that critics such as the philosopher
Berel Lang and the Holocaust survivor and novelist Elie Wiesel believe are
appropriate. [. . .]. Postmodern techniques may impart a sense of the
“unrepresentable” more effectively than realism; postmodern fiction
“defamiliarizes” the over-familiar and often demonstrates how the Holocaust has
become commodified or turned into spectacle. [. . .]. In imagining a range of
responses, from denial at one extreme to continued remembrance at the other,
postmodern fiction forms an intervention into the debate over how, if at all, the
Holocaust may be represented. (“Appendix” 393-4)
27
Sicher and King both cite around a dozen examples of “postmodernist Holocaust
fiction”. Some of those mentioned are Don DeLillo’s satire White Noise (1984), in
which the history of Nazism appears as just another commodity in a world of simulacra;
Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991), where time and history are narrated in reverse;
Emily Prager’s allegorical Eve’s Tattoo (1992), which satirizes the modern culture of
memorialization (and which I discuss in Chapter 2 of the present study); Christopher
Hope’s Serenity House (1992), which draws parallels between surveillance and tourism
in contemporary Western “civilized” society and the recent Nazi past; Robert Harris’s
counterfactual Fatherland (1992), set in a 1960s Germany where Hitler has survived the
war and the disappearance of the Jews has gone unnoticed; and W. G. Sebald’s
Austerlitz (2001), which explores the legacy of the Holocaust through the eyes of a
Kindertransport survivor (which I analyze in detail in Chapter 4). Sicher also includes
Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces in his list, and one would expect Foer’s Everything is
Illuminated to be included in future surveys, particularly for its parody of Holocaust
tourism. This suggests that the works I have chosen for the present study are all in
some sense “postmodern”, raising the question of whether I will be interrogating them
in that light.
While the lens of postmodernist thought has indeed been a productive tool for
understanding these texts, the present study will have a different focus. My chief
emphasis is on the relationship between the writer and text in the present and the events
and victims of the past, and the ethical and epistemological problems this raises. I am,
therefore, interested in post-1990 non-survivor Holocaust narratives from the West for
the narrative strategies they employ to foreground their engagement with these issues,
rather than the correlation between these strategies and the “postmodern condition” as
such. While recent prose narratives may or may not employ postmodern techniques,
what they have in common is a focus on the ethical problems of writing and
remembering the Holocaust from their standpoint of historical and generational
distance, while revealing their desire for connection with the past.
Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs (1992), for example, is a metafictional exploration of how
evil in the past is remembered in the present. Its present-day narrator, Jeremy,
undertakes to write a memoir of his mother-in-law, June Tremaine. Jeremy’s firstperson narrative about this project alternates with third-person episodes from June’s life
28
in post-war England and France. The central transfiguring event of June’s story, saved
until the end, is an encounter with two black dogs during her honeymoon in 1946. On a
hillside path in France, briefly separated from her new husband, June is faced with the
hungry, snarling animals. Formerly a strict atheist – she and her husband are
communist intellectuals – June offers a prayer, has a vision of God, and miraculously
manages to fend off the dogs with a penknife. Later, the local villagers say that the
dogs are left behind from the German occupation, and that they had been trained by the
Gestapo to attack and even rape women. The significance of June’s encounter is
twofold: her subsequent belief in spiritualism drives a wedge between June and her
arch-materialist husband; and the black dogs come to signify for her the embodiment of
evil that perpetually lurks below the surface of European civilization, and which may
reappear at any time. Thus evil is figured as resistant to rational explanation – its
effects are felt on more instinctual levels. In a present-day episode, Jeremy visits the
former concentration camp at Majdanek with a woman he has just met at a conference.
Their reaction to the horror they feel is a life-affirming three-day bout of lovemaking.
The connection between present-day Majdanek and the memory of Nazi atrocities in
France is thus embodied not in June but in Jeremy, whose narration is revealed as a selfreflexive examination of his own motives in investigating the lives of earlier
generations. In effect, McEwan’s novel takes on the form of memoir, metafictionally
acknowledging the importance of this genre to Holocaust literature, while also
foregrounding the gulf between generations in how the past is apprehended.
A similar concern informs Helen Darville’s The Hand That Signed the Paper (1994), a
novel which explores Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis from the perspective of the
niece of a man indicted for war crimes in present-day Australia. In addition to this
framing narrative, in which Fiona Kovalenko helps her elderly uncle Vitaly get legal
representation (though he dies before the trial begins), the story of Vitaly’s youth in
1930s and 1940s Europe is presented. Vitaly and his family are brutalized by Stalin’s
imposition of communism, making them ripe for recruitment to the Nazi cause. Vitaly
joins the Waffen SS and serves at Treblinka, killing daily, while his sister Katerina
becomes the mistress of a Nazi officer. After the war the Kovalenkos are reunited at
Displaced Persons camps in Italy before being resettled in Surrey, and eventually taking
up permanent residentship in Australia. In this novel, the psychology of violence and
racial hatred is intimately explored, with the narrative conveying a powerful suggestion
29
that social marginalization, hunger and ignorance are more important factors than race
or ideology. “The brothers Kovalenko and their comrades – Nikolai and Shura – did
not kill Jews just because they were poor and Ukrainian, and did not know any better.
They killed Jews because they believed that they themselves were savages” (77).
However, the lack of an authoritative narrator (the wartime story is focalized through
several characters, Ukrainian and German) leads to a suspicion of moral equivocation.
Fiona asks Vitaly if he is sorry for the past, but he gives no clear answer. Fiona herself
refuses to condemn the actions of her forebears, instead concentrating on shielding her
family from harm. This book thus addresses the difficult question of how descendants
should approach the actions of a previous generation whose choices were radically
unlike our own. The scandal that surrounded its publication only reinforces this theme.
The Hand That Signed the Paper was originally published under the pseudonym “Helen
Demidenko”, the similarity to the narrator’s name “Kovalenko” implying that it was a
disguised account of the author’s own family history. This impression was further
supported by her behaviour during the book’s publicity, in which she dressed up in
Ukrainian clothing. The author was soon unmasked as an Australian of Anglo-Saxon
extraction, but not before she had won three literary prizes. In her chapter on this novel
in Holocaust Fiction, Vice lists the elements of the “Demidenko affair” as “alleged
plagiarism, antisemitism, inauthenticity, appropriation, historical revisionism, [and]
masquerade” (142).
Vice also notes how the book led to, or coincided with, problems between the Jewish
and Ukrainian communities in Australia, and how it was condemned for “humanizing”
perpetrators. LaCapra is one critic who has criticized giving a voice to perpetrators,
arguing that it creates “an objectionable (or at best deeply equivocal) kind of discomfort
or unease in the reader or viewer by furthering fascination and a confused sense of
identification with or involvement in certain figures and their beliefs or actions in a
manner that may well subvert judgment and critical response” (Writing 202-3).
LaCapra cites George Steiner’s Portage to San Cristóbal of A. H. (1981), which dares to
focalize Hitler, and Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser (1995; translated as The Reader,
1997), one of whose central characters is a former concentration camp guard. Schlink’s
narrative is of particular relevance to the present study. In a German town in 1958,
fifteen-year-old Michael Berg has an affair with Hanna Schmitz, a tram conductor
twenty-one years his senior. At times she abuses him, and also asks him to read to her
30
before making love. Their liaison ends. Eight years later, Michael, now a law student,
witnesses Hanna’s trial for war crimes, discovering that she was a Nazi guard who
allowed a group of Jewish women to burn to death in a church. Michael also belatedly
realises that Hanna is illiterate, and that this disability has to an extent shaped her life
choices. It emerges that Hanna got Jewish women to read to her before she sent them to
the gas chamber. Was this an act of compassion, or did she send them to the chamber to
protect her secret? The narrative does not make this clear, but Hanna is judged guilty
by the court and sentenced to life imprisonment. Later, Michael begins to send Hanna
recordings of himself reading aloud, through which she cures her illiteracy by
comparing the tapes with books in the prison library. The day before her planned
release, Hanna commits suicide. Michael tries to give the money he inherits from
Hanna to a Jewish survivor, who refuses. Instead he donates it to a charity specialising
in illiteracy. Thus the theme of this novel – Germany’s difficulty in coming to terms
with its past – is figured through the metaphor of illiteracy and its “cure”. Michael is
innocent yet becomes complicit through his status as “reader”, that is, through his
interaction with a perpetrator, Hanna, who is in turn the embodiment of Michael’s (and
Germany’s) obscure sense of guilt. Schlink’s narrative subtly addresses important
themes including the difficulty of judgement, the unreliability of evidence, and the
problem of assigning guilt and responsibility in an ambiguous moral universe. The
same concerns are found in Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room (2001), whose third
section in particular is a moving and thought-provoking examination of a contemporary
German’s obsession with what his grandfather may have done in the war. As such I
briefly discuss Seiffert’s novel in Chapter 5 in relation to Foer’s Everything is
Illuminated, whose plot similarly hinges on the secrets kept by the previous generation
but one. Indeed, this perspective of attempting to address the past through personal
familial connections, whose lives nevertheless took place at an irreducible distance from
one’s own, both temporally and metaphorically, seems to me a highly useful way to
generate transgenerational empathy.
Before addressing these texts, and exploring how they enact transgenerational empathy
in narrative, I turn to the topic of trauma theory, in order to evaluate what contribution
this field can make to understanding Holocaust memory in contemporary narratives.
31
Chapter 1
Moving beyond notions of literal truth and the belated sublime: the historical,
political and clinical controversies of trauma
To what extent are contemporary Holocaust narratives analogous to, comparable with,
or even attributable to “traumatic memory”? Conversely, how useful is this
phenomenon as a tool with which to gain insight into the workings of such narratives?
According to Shoshana Felman, “The twentieth century can be defined as a century of
trauma” (Juridical 171 n.1). But does that mean that trauma should be the only or
central concept with which to analyze and understand that century and its
representations? This chapter will investigate the origins and debates of “trauma
theory” in order to assess its usefulness and relevance to contemporary Holocaust
narratives.
The word trauma, which comes from the Greek for wound, has been associated with
physical injury since the late seventeenth century. It did not make the transition to
study of the mind until two hundred years later, when, in 1889, “traumatic neurosis” and
“traumatic psychosis” made their first appearances in print (attributed to the
neurologists Hermann Oppenheim and Jean-Martin Charcot respectively).3 This
transition from the physiological to the psychological sphere is worth bearing in mind
when considering the multiple meanings of trauma today. The association brings ideas
of violence, laceration and pain, which contribute to the power the term carries in
contemporary discourse. The connection also implies that psychological trauma is
caused by an external source. Freud wrote in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920)
that traumas are “those excitations from outside that are strong enough to break through
the protective barrier” of consciousness (68). But trauma is also etymologically
connected to the German word traum, meaning both dream and nightmare, suggesting
the role of internal factors in the aetiology of symptoms. Indeed, this problem of inside
versus outside is crucial to an understanding of the controversies surrounding trauma.
Whether the memory of a trauma refers to a real event, something imagined, or
“trauma” and “traumatic”. Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989.
“traumatic neurosis” n. A Dictionary of Psychology. Andrew M. Colman. Oxford University Press, 1996.
Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Exeter University. Accessed 5 Aug.
2008. <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t87.e8556>
3
32
something in between, is the central difficulty informing not just medico-legal issues
like “false memory syndrome” but also the critical discourse known as “trauma theory”
or “trauma studies”.
The foundation on which trauma studies are based is the symptomatology of shocking
events. Since the nineteenth century, various terms have been offered to describe the
symptoms presented by victims of train crashes, trench warfare, concentration camps,
sexual violence, and other horrifying experiences. Descriptions such as “fright
neurosis”, “war/combat neurosis”, “shell shock”, “survivor syndrome” and
“concentration camp syndrome” have all fallen into disuse or become historicized.
Nowadays, “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” (“PTSD”) has become the ubiquitous
diagnosis for everyone from hostages and rape victims to survivors of car crashes and
returnees from war zones. This gathering together of disparate groups relies on certain
assumptions about memory which originate in the late nineteenth century but have
become more pervasive since 1980. The most important of these is the theory of
dissociation. As Ruth Leys explains in Trauma: A Genealogy (2000):
Post-traumatic stress disorder is fundamentally a disorder of memory. The idea
is that, owing to the emotions of terror and surprise caused by certain events, the
mind is split or dissociated: it is unable to register the wound to the psyche
because the ordinary mechanisms of awareness and cognition are destroyed. As
a result, the victim is unable to recollect and integrate the hurtful experience in
normal consciousness; instead, she is haunted or possessed by intrusive
traumatic memories. The experience of the trauma, fixed or frozen in time,
refuses to be represented as past, but is perpetually reexperienced in a painful,
dissociated, traumatic present. All the symptoms characteristic of PTSD –
flashbacks, nightmares and other reexperiences, emotional numbing, depression,
guilt, autonomic arousal, explosive violence or tendency to hypervigilance – are
thought to be the result of this fundamental mental dissociation. (2)
This psychological diagnostic has proved highly suggestive for a wide range of
discourses, including political science, sociology, philosophy and history. Trauma has
been used variously as a model with which to analyse historical process, interpret the
testimony of survivor-victims, explain the passing on of experience through
generations, and describe the collective memory of societies. Unsurprisingly, given this
intellectual climate, trauma has also emerged as a major theme for writers of fiction,
memoir and other narrative literature. Simultaneously it has been taken up by literary
critics and thence to the realm of critical theory.
33
However, if the concept of trauma has moved from physiology to psychology, and from
psychology to a range of other discourses, its meaning may be slippery and uncertain.
Indeed, even within the field of psychology there are fundamental disagreements.
Before coming to these, however, it may be useful to survey briefly the cultural and
clinical history of trauma. Controversy in recent times has often centred on the way
earlier writings have been interpreted.
In Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age (2001), editors
Micale and Lerner put the emergence of psychological trauma firmly in the context of
cultural modernity. They identify four distinct developments of the period 1870-1930
that helped shape the concept: the spread of railways, the advent of accident insurance
in the nascent welfare state, the rise of psychological psychiatry, and World War I.
Indeed, a good starting point for any history of trauma is the emergence of railway
travel in the mid-nineteenth century, and the concurrent phenomenon of the train crash.
Ralph Harrington explains how railway accidents focussed attention on unusual medical
disorders:
In mid- and late-nineteenth-century medical and medico-legal discourse, railway
accidents acquired a highly significant role as agents of traumatic experience.
Few events in ordinary civilian life could equal the railway accident for
violence, terror, and destruction, and it is unsurprising that this event, the
product of industrialized modernity, should be seen as capable of bringing about
new, insidious, highly disruptive forms of injury and disorder in the human
body. Such perceptions found full expression in response to the ‘railway spine’
phenomenon, which was characterized by the manifestation of a variety of
physical disorders in railway accident victims who had apparently suffered no
significant organic injury. (209)
In the absence of discernible “organic injury”, then, doctors and others began to theorize
a connection between the shock suffered by the mind and the physical symptoms
presented by the victim. Harrington argues that while the study of “railway spine” in
the 1860s has hitherto been considered the first instance of this “concept of strong
emotion producing organic disorders”, in fact “a tradition of surgical enquiry along
those lines existed in the 1820s and 1830s” (216). Nevertheless, mid-nineteenth century
society was resistant to claims of a causal connection between mind and body. As
Harrington explains, early legal compensation claims brought by rail crash victims
34
tended to rest on a distinction between mere emotional or “moral” reaction and a
“nervous shock” that was “organic” in nature; proof of the latter was necessary for
individuals to win against the railway companies. It was not until later in the century
that neurologists and psychotherapists such as Charcot, Pierre Janet, and, later, Sigmund
Freud, began to assert the existence of psychological trauma, though the cases they
examined were so-called “hysterical” symptoms in women. As Leys notes in her
Introduction, Charcot and Janet theorized a “wounding” of the mind owing to a sudden
shock, and used “hypnotic catharsis” to treat the resulting “memory crisis” or
dissociation (4). Elsewhere, Janet has been called the “the first to identify dissociation
as the crucial psychological mechanism involved in the genesis of a wide variety of post
traumatic symptoms” (van der Kolk, “Pierre Janet” 366), and “the first to describe the
memory disturbances that accompany traumatization” (369).
However, such theories of the unconscious mind took a long time to become
mainstream. Indeed, the diagnostic reaction to returning soldiers from World War I
echoed the response to “railway spine”, by attributing their symptoms to physical
concussion of the spine caused by exploding shells (hence the term “shell shock”,
coined by Charles Stanley Myers in 1915). The experience of the trenches caused a
huge range of physical symptoms, including “withered, trembling arms, paralysed
hands, stumbling gaits, tics, tremors and shakes, as well as numbed muteness,
palpitations, sweaty hallucinations and nightmares” (Leese 3). However, as Leys
documents, most people thought sufferers from shell shock to be either malingerers
motivated by cowardice or greed for compensation, or weak types inherently
predisposed to break down. Nevertheless a few doctors resurrected the theory of
dissociation and offered treatment using hypnosis. Given the sex of their patients, they
were forced to acknowledge for the first time that men as well as women could be
affected by so-called “hysterical” symptoms, or as the new term had it, “war neurosis”.
However, due to the lack of agreement as to causes, treatment varied widely depending
on the institution to which a soldier was sent, further reinforcing scepticism in the wider
world about the reality of the condition (Leys 4-5). A few forward-thinking doctors
planned to establish special centres of psychoanalytic treatment, but as Freud lamented
in his Introduction to Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses (1919), the war ended
before this aim could be realized: “The opportunity for a thorough investigation of these
35
affections was thus unluckily lost – though, we must add, the early recurrence of such
an opportunity is not a thing to be desired” (207).
Nevertheless, some doctors attempted a more enlightened approach to shell shock or
war neurosis during the war. Leys cites William Brown, who thought that the
symptoms resulted from repressed emotion, that is, the necessity for soldiers to maintain
self-control and discipline in the face of emotionally affecting horrors. Thus Brown’s
treatment involved hypnotic cathartic or “abreaction”, an emotional acting out similar to
modern “psychodynamic” therapy (Leys 84-5). Another figure, one who has become
familiar through Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration (1991), is W. H. R. Rivers. This
doctor and anthropologist treated, among many others, the war poets Siegfried Sassoon
and Wilfred Owen at the Craiglockhart Hydropathic Hospital in Edinburgh. In an
article for The Lancet in 1918, Rivers criticizes the common advice given to sufferers of
war neurosis, that they should manfully repress their memories and suppress all
thoughts of war. This, he argues, results in the repressed thoughts crowding into the
mind at bedtime, disrupting sleep. Instead, he notes, if patients allow their thoughts
headroom in the daytime, as and when they occur, their condition improves. Indeed,
Rivers, heavily influenced by Freud, goes so far as to say that the symptoms of shell
shock are the result not so much of the traumatic events themselves, but of later
attempts at their repression:
I hope to show that many of the most trying and distressing symptoms from
which the subjects of war neurosis suffer are not the necessary result of the
strains and shocks to which they have been exposed in warfare, but are due to
the attempt to banish from the mind distressing memories of warfare or painful
affective states which have come into being as the result of their war experience.
(173)
Meanwhile, the tendency to recommend keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of trauma,
which Rivers identified as unhelpful, led to some extreme forms of treatment. Canadian
neurologist Lewis Yealland, for example, combined verbal chastisement with electroshock therapy. Freud, in his Appendix to “Memorandum on the Electrical Treatment of
War Neurotics” (1920), reflected on how such methods came to be justified. He noted
the logic of the view that if war neurosis resulted from a mental conflict between, on the
one hand, an “unconscious inclination” (212) to withdraw from the horrific demands of
war (self-preservation), and on the other, “motives [. . .] such as ambition, self-esteem,
36
patriotism, the habit of obedience and the example of others” (213), electrical treatment
might persuade the soldier that the pain it involved was worse than the horror of
returning to the front. Indeed, this method met with initial success. However, Freud
argues that back at the trenches, those horrors would again become uppermost in the
patient’s mind and bring back the neurosis. For Freud this proves that “the
psychotherapeutic method introduced by me” (215) is a more effective treatment than
electric shocks.
In her chapter on “Medics and the Military” in An Intimate History of Killing (2000),
Joanna Bourke describes how the problem of war neurosis resurfaced during World War
II. Once again thousands of soldiers were breaking down and presenting symptoms that
made them unfit for service. Military and financial pressures led to efforts to find
effective treatment and learn the lessons of the past. As Bourke explains: “During the
First World War, four fifths of men who had entered hospital suffering shell shock were
never able to return to military duty: it was imperative that such high levels of
‘permanent ineffectives’ were reduced” (256). Thus the emphasis was on getting
soldiers back to the front as quickly as possible, using drugs such as insulin and
barbiturates, often in conjunction with electroshock therapy (257-8). Bourke shows
how army psychiatrists were wholly subservient to their military superiors, who insisted
that war aims should take precedence over interest in the individual: “Within the armed
forces, psychologists found themselves with very little independence” (262). Thus
attitudes were generally unsympathetic. Bourke describes hostility towards any
“feminine” or “cowardly” behaviour, regardless of the horrors the patient had suffered,
witnessed or perpetrated (252-4). This macho attitude is a possible explanation for the
long gap between the work done during World War II (such as Abram Kardiner’s The
Traumatic Neuroses of War [1941]) and the official recognition of PTSD. Perhaps
acceptance could only come in a society where those who break down are seen not as
weak or cowardly, but as victims of forces beyond their control.
This change in social attitudes is clearly seen in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. In
1970s United States, groups of psychiatrists and veterans actively campaigned for
recognition and compensation, and ran therapy centres and discussion groups. One of
these, “Operation Outreach”, commissioned studies on the symptoms of surviving
soldiers that outlined what would eventually be codified and legitimized as
37
“Posttraumatic Stress Disorder” in the Third Edition of the American Psychiatric
Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) (1980).
The most important aspect of this new category of disorder was that it made a traumatic
event a necessary causal factor. For the first time it was officially recognized that the
horrific occurrences witnessed and perpetrated by practitioners of modern warfare could
cause them psychiatric problems, regardless of previous mental state or genetic
predisposition. Reactions to this development were mixed, as Richard McNally has
pointed out: “While many applauded the new diagnosis as finally giving a voice to
survivors of trauma, others questioned its validity, seeing it as a political artifact of the
antiwar movement” (Remembering 1). Nevertheless the attitude that sees trauma as
something from outside that assails an unwilling victim has become the new orthodoxy.
However, a historical overview of official reactions to soldiers’ trauma shows that the
issue of external/internal aetiology is more complicated. As we have seen, the first
reaction of military authorities to soldiers breaking down during World War I was to
assume that a physical cause – the concussions of exploding shells affecting the spine –
were to blame. In comparison, the history of “Gulf War Syndrome”, as suffered by
veterans of the US-led conflict in Iraq in 1990, shows how far attitudes have changed.
Symptoms of this condition include fatigue, memory problems and, later, terminal
tumours and permanent neurological damage. Fred Milano, in an article published in
International Social Science Review in 2000, explains how the authorities dealt with the
issue at the time:
At first, the military attributed [the soldiers’ symptoms] to “stress”. PostTraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was well-documented in Vietnam, and its
crippling effects are still evident several decades after the war. It provided a
convenient culprit, one already familiar to the general public. (19)
So, the immediate response to the problem was to focus not on the nature of the war
itself but on the psychology of soldiers. Later, in 1996, the American Psychiatric
Association published a sympathetic volume on the psychiatric fall-out of the war,
bolstered by a foreword by the politician Dick Cheney.4
4
Ursano, Robert J. and Ann E. Norwood (eds). Emotional Aftermath of the Persian Gulf War: Veterans,
Families, Communities, and Nations. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1996.
38
Yet this response was also seen as politically motivated evasion. As Milano says,
“veterans were not buying it; they had seen this shell game before” (19). He explains
how allegations emerged that the symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome were caused not by
the normal stresses of war but by the combined effects of multiple vaccinations and
anti-nerve gas pills, the spraying of organophosphate pesticides on military tents, and
the use of depleted uranium shells. These allegations are controversial and subject to
ongoing debate and investigation, by, for example, the Research Advisory Committee
on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses in the United States. Nevertheless, the case illustrates
how meanings of trauma are both historically contingent and politically motivated. The
distance we have come from denying the psychological nature of shell shock to using
PTSD as an excuse for (allegedly) chemically induced Gulf War Syndrome suggests
that trauma is a changeable political tool rather than a stable and definable phenomenon.
In Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (1994), Judith
Lewis Herman argues that the history of trauma has been politically determined from
the beginning. She contends that the initial study of hysteria by Charcot and Janet
“grew out of the republican, anticlerical political movement of the late nineteenth
century in France”, while for both shell shock and PTSD, the “political context was the
collapse of a cult of war and the growth of an anti-war movement” (9). Herman’s
purpose in this historico-political contextualisation of trauma is to shift the agenda from
preoccupation with “male” activities like warfare towards “female” issues such as rape
and domestic abuse. For Herman, the post-1960s Western feminist movement has
revealed a “combat neurosis of the sex war” (28) that should claim our attention and
lead to systematized attempts at healing. That this has not yet occurred is attributed to
society’s wilful turning away from such issues and refusal to face the “truth”: “When
the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often
secrecy prevails [. . .]” (1). Jenny Edkins, in Trauma and the Memory of Politics
(2003), sees such “secrecy” as the direct result of “sovereign power, the power of the
modern nation-state”. She goes on: “Sovereign power produces and is itself produced
by trauma: it provokes wars, genocides and famines. But it works by concealing its
involvement and claiming to be a provider not a destroyer of security” (xv). For Edkins
this means that trauma results not just from violence or threats to the integrity of the
self, but specifically when that threat comes from a previously trusted source:
39
What we call trauma takes place when the very powers that we are convinced
will protect us and give us security become our tormentors: when the
community of which we considered ourselves members turns against us or when
our family is no longer a source of refuge but a site of danger. (4)
Like Herman, Edkins implies that trauma is caused by secrecy and treachery, rather than
the physical act of violence as such. Again like Herman, she places abuse of women as
central. “The modern state cannot be assumed to be a place of safety, any more than the
patriarchal family can. Political abuse in one parallels sexual abuse in the other. Both
give rise to what we call symptoms of trauma” (7).
Another important example of the implications of trauma for society and politics is the
controversy over so-called “recovered memories”. Richard McNally, in his chapter on
“The Politics of Trauma” in Remembering Trauma (2003), describes how this unfolded.
In the United States in the 1980s, some psychologists claimed that extremely high
percentages of women had been sexually abused in childhood, and that repressed
traumatic memories of this abuse could be recovered using hypnotherapy. At the same
time, McNally documents, “child welfare workers were claiming to have discovered
widespread current abuse of children in daycare centers” (7). These developments led
to many lawsuits and care home sackings. In response, the False Memory Syndrome
Foundation (FMSF) was set up in 1992 by a group of accused parents. This
organisation argued, with backing from scientists in the field, “that therapeutic
techniques [including hypnosis] designed to recover hidden memories of trauma often
result in the inadvertent creation of psychologically compelling but false memories of
abuse” (14-15). Many of those States of America that had changed the statute of
limitations to allow for memories from childhood being cited decades later in court now
reversed their decisions, while some patients sued their therapists for malpractice.
Nevertheless therapists who believed in the importance of recovering repressed
memories of trauma fought back, arguing that the FMSF wanted to “buttress the forces
of patriarchy and silence the voices of survivors” (18). They also claimed that there was
no evidence that false memories could be created during therapy.
40
McNally documents a related incident that illustrates further how political trauma has
become. In 1998, an article5 published in a respected psychological journal, which
meta-analysed data regarding childhood sexual experiences, concluded that these
experiences rarely predicted poor adjustment or other problems in adult life: “Lasting
psychological harm was the exception, not the rule” (McNally 23). The United States
Congress acted to condemn the article, gaining the support of the academic hierarchy.
Unsurprisingly, “[m]any psychologists were outraged that leaders of the American
Psychological Association had capitulated to political pressure” (24), and worried that
academic freedom and scientific method were under threat. As McNally notes: “In
addition to highlighting the hazards of conducting politically controversial research, this
incident illustrated just how explosive the topic of trauma had become in American
society” (25).
These political issues surrounding trauma stem in part from differing interpretations of
the clinical definition of PTSD. As noted above, the first official codification of the
condition was in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual (1980). Perhaps reflecting its origins in post-Vietnam protests,
which emphasised the particular horrors of that war, this definition specified that for an
event to be sufficiently traumatic to give rise to a diagnosis of PTSD, it must be
“outside the range of usual human experience” (qtd. in Caruth 3). However, subsequent
epidemiological studies found that relatively common events like rape and road
accidents – very much within the range of usual human experience – also often lead to
PTSD. Consequently, the fourth edition of the ASA’s Manual in 1994 (DSM-IV)
removed this clause. Instead of “outside the range”, the Manual and other textbooks
now emphasize the “extreme” or “overwhelming” nature of trauma. “The essential
feature of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder”, the ASA’s definition begins, “is the
development of characteristic symptoms following exposure to an extreme traumatic
stressor” (DSM-IV-TR 463) .6 Similarly, the Concise Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry
(COTP) notes that “usually the event is so intense as to be overwhelming” (90), while
Elsevier’s Textbook of Psychiatry (ToP) says that PTSD arises “from the overwhelming
and overloading of normal emotional processing” (223). This overwhelming extremity
Rind, B., P. Tromovitch, and R. Bauserman. “A meta-analytic examination of assumed properties of
child sexual abuse using college samples.” Psychological Bulletin 124 (1998): 22-53.
6
To bridge the gap between the 1994 text and a projected fifth edition in 2012, the ASA issued a ‘Text
Revision’ (DSM-IV-TR) in 2000. It is this version to which my pagination refers.
5
41
must involve “direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened
death or serious injury, or other threat to one’s physical integrity”, or, equally,
“witnessing” such an event, or even merely “learning about” its happening to a loved
one (DSM-IV-TR 463). Events that may trigger PTSD include
military combat, violent personal assault (sexual assault, physical attack,
robbery, mugging), being kidnapped, being taken hostage, terrorist attack,
torture, incarceration as a prisoner of war or in a concentration camp, natural or
manmade disasters, severe automobile accidents, or being diagnosed with a lifethreatening illness. (DSM-IV-TR 463-4)
This wide range of experience problematizes the application of clinical PTSD to other
discourses. For example, trauma is often used as a framework to describe the
experience of the Holocaust. But to many, any kind of relativization of this event is
anathema, let alone the comparison with being mugged, and indeed it is difficult to see
what factors the two experiences have in common outside very narrow clinical criteria.
If, then, this comparison is invalid, the concept of trauma may be an inappropriate
model with which to interrogate the Holocaust.
However, for theorists of trauma, it is not so much the event itself as the memory of that
event that is of central concern. As Leys points out, for the purposes of trauma studies,
PTSD is “fundamentally a disorder of memory” (2). This focus arises from the fact that
sufferers from PTSD are, typically, haunted by intrusive and repetitive memories of
their trauma. Occasionally this includes a strange experience whereby the past event is
felt to be still somehow happening in the present:
In rare instances, the person experiences dissociative states that last from a few
seconds to several hours, or even days, during which components of the event
are relived and the person behaves as though experiencing the event at that
moment (Criterion B3). These episodes, often referred to as ‘flashbacks’, are
typically brief but can be associated with prolonged distress and heightened
arousal. (DSM-IV-TR 464)
Clinicians have explained this phenomenon with reference to ideas of “narrative” and
“autobiographical” memory, which is thought to be disrupted by traumatic events. The
New Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry (NOTP) describes this line of diagnostic thinking:
42
PTSD patients have relatively poor intentional recall of the traumatic event.
Their narratives of the event tend to be fragmented and disorganized. With
successful treatment, the narratives become elaborated and organized. These
observations have led to the hypothesis that insufficient elaboration of the event
and its meaning leads to the re-experiencing symptoms of PTSD.
Autobiographical memories are normally organized in a way that prevents
triggering of very vivid and emotional re-experiencing of an event. Recall is
driven by themes and personal time periods, and it is relatively abstract. Ehlers
and Clark suggested that re-experiencing in PTSD occurs because the trauma
memory is inadequately linked to its context in time, place, and other
autobiographical memories. Stimuli that resemble those present during the
traumatic event can thus trigger vivid memories and strong emotional responses
that are experienced as if the event was happening right now. (764)
Various treatments have been suggested for this dissociative state, including drugs,
hypnotherapy, and Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT). CBT involves exposing the
patient to the source or site of the trauma, both literally and by way of the imagination.
This “repeated reliving of the event helps [the patient] to create an organised memory
and facilitates the distinction that intrusive thoughts and images are memories rather
than something happening right now” (NOTP 767).
However, the most popular treatment approach is referred to variously by the textbooks
as “talking cure”, “working through” or “testimony”. In a typical formulation, it
involves going over the “trauma story” in order “to rehearse the trauma and reawaken
associated emotions”, with the aim of achieving “habituation” to them (ToP 224).
Descended from Freudian psychoanalysis, this process of working-through requires the
presence of a listener or therapist. Dori Laub, a Holocaust survivor, psychotherapist
and co-founder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale
University, takes this theory to its extreme in his contributions to Testimony: Crises of
Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992). In his chapter “Bearing
Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening”, Laub argues that as a listener to Holocaust
survivors, he is “the enabler of testimony” (58), and that the act of uncovering traumatic
memory is “a journey the survivor cannot traverse or return from alone” (59). For
Laub, this process is not one of remembering, but of discovery: “Knowledge in the
testimony is [. . .] not simply a factual given that is reproduced and replicated by the
testifier, but a genuine advent, an event in its own right” (62). Laub accounts for this
radical epistemology with a hypothesis about the way the brain deals with traumatic
events. Trauma, he asserts, is “a record that has yet to be made. Massive trauma
43
precludes its registration; the observing and recording mechanisms of the human mind
are temporarily knocked out, malfunction” (57). Laub’s theory suggests that the
explanation for traumatic “flashbacks” is that the mind is unable to cope with certain
experiences, fails to “register” them as memories, and instead confronts the survivor
with a repeat of the experience that can only be transformed into a memory through the
act of testimony. Traumatic flashbacks, in this analysis, are hardly memories at all, at
least in the usual sense of temporally mediated recollections. Rather, they are instances
of the literal return of the event itself.
This view is shared by Bessel A. van der Kolk, a clinical psychologist whose writings
on trauma in the early 1990s have proved highly influential. Kolk’s theories are drawn
from his study of the previously largely forgotten nineteenth century psychotherapist
Pierre Janet. Janet made a distinction between “narrative memory” and “automatic
synthesis” or “habit memory” (nowadays usually known as “implicit memory”). While
we share habit memory with animals, narrative memory is uniquely human. Janet
thought that extreme experiences resist “integration” into narrative memory, “which
causes the memory of these experiences to be stored differently and not be available for
retrieval under ordinary conditions; it becomes dissociated from conscious awareness
and voluntary control” (van der Kolk, “Intrusive Past” 160). Kolk claims that as a result
of this dissociation, traumatic memories are not subject to the usual process of distortion
and inaccuracy over time, nor are they contaminated by subjective meaning, reinterpretation, or elaboration. Instead they are “engraved” on the mind, and as such
represent a literal, unassailable truth about the past. Traumatic memories, the
“unassimilated scraps of overwhelming experience” (176), are “inflexible and
invariable” (163).
However, collecting up scraps of experience and transforming them into narrative does
not necessarily require the memories to be traumatic as such. Proust’s “madeleine” is a
case in point. “Mémoire involontaire” is, for Proust, the mechanism that triggers
recollection of the past; voluntary or intellectual effort is always doomed to fail. Walter
Benjamin notes that this involuntary memory (an adaptation of Bergson’s “mémoire
pure”) refers to “only what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously, what
has not happened to the subject as an experience” (157). This is reminiscent of Laub’s
idea that “massive trauma precludes its registration; the observing and recording
44
mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out”, and of Kolk’s assertion
that traumatic experience “becomes dissociated from conscious awareness and
voluntary control”. But Proust was writing about the return of untraumatic childhood
memories, which nevertheless eluded him before returning in the same powerful manner
as “massive trauma” is supposed by this theory to do, before being re-integrated into his
life story in the form of Á la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
To what extent, then, is involuntary memory inherently traumatic? For Cathy Caruth,
trauma is central to all kinds of memory and indeed to experience in general. Caruth
takes the ideas of non-registration (Laub) and undistorted truth (Kolk) into the realm of
critical theory, exploring their implications for history and memory. In a widely quoted
formulation from her Introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), Caruth
asserts that
the pathology cannot be defined either by the event itself – which may or may
not be catastrophic, and may not traumatize everyone equally – nor can it be
defined in terms of a distortion of the event, achieving its haunting power as a
result of distorting personal significances attached to it. The pathology consists,
rather, solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not
assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated
possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be
possessed by an image or event. (4-5, emphasis in original)
For Caruth, the experience of possession is “the literal return of the event against the
will of the one it inhabits”, and this essential “truth” of traumatic experience is always
only experienced “belatedly” (5).
Caruth’s crucial idea of belatedness draws on two interrelated Freudian concepts:
Nachträglichkeit (“deferred action”, “afterwardsness”) and latency. The idea of latency
is partly based on PTSD symptomatology. Clinical psychologists have noted that there
is often a delay, sometimes of quite significant length, between shocking event and
traumatic symptom. This has led to the creation of a sub-category in DSM-IV, “With
Delayed Onset”, which is reserved for patients whose symptoms appear more than six
months after the event. According to the New Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry, this “is
found in a minority (11 per cent or less) of the cases” (765). Nevertheless it has proved
highly suggestive for Caruth, who has extended it through her idea of “belated”
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personal trauma into the realm of history, arguing that events only gain their force from
the temporal delay with which they are experienced:
The historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after
its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is
first experienced at all. [. . .]. For history to be a history of a trauma means that
it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs; or
to put it somewhat differently, that a history can only be grasped in the very
inaccessibility of its occurrence. (8)
For this argument Caruth relies on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939), a text whose
importance she argues has been (traumatically?) forgotten. In this, his last major work,
Freud attempted to rewrite the history of the Jewish people in terms of traumatic
latency. He argued that the source of Jewish monotheism is the hitherto concealed truth
that Moses was an Egyptian, one who became influenced by the monotheistic “Aton”
religion that was favoured by a short-lived Pharaoh. After leading the Exodus, Freud
hypothesizes, Moses was eventually murdered in a revolt. However, the memory of his
leadership and his monotheistic ideas resurfaced generations later, just as the
descendants of Moses’ Jews were accepting Jahve as their God:
The religion of Moses [. . .] had not perished. A sort of memory of it had
survived, obscured and distorted [. . .]. It was this tradition of a great past that
continued to exert its effect from the background; it slowly attained more and
more power over the minds of the people, and at last succeeded in changing the
God Jahve into the God of Moses and in bringing again to life the abandoned
religion Moses had instituted centuries ago. (196)
In order to back up this revolutionary claim, Freud proposes a psychological analogy
that harks back to the link between trauma and railway accidents first made eighty years
earlier:
It may happen that someone gets away from, apparently unharmed, the spot
where he has suffered a shocking accident, for instance a train collision. In the
course of the following weeks, however, he develops a series of grave psychical
and motor symptoms, which one can ascribe only to his shock or whatever else
happened at the time of the accident. He has developed a “traumatic neurosis”.
This appears quite incomprehensible and is therefore a novel fact. The time that
elapsed between the accident and the first appearance of the symptoms is called
the “incubation period”, a transparent allusion to the pathology of infectious
disease. As an afterthought we observe that – in spite of the fundamental
difference in the two cases, the problem of the traumatic neurosis and that of
46
Jewish Monotheism – there is a correspondence in one point. It is the feature
which one might term latency. There are the best grounds for thinking that in
the history of the Jewish religion there is a long period – after the breaking away
from the Moses religion – during which no trace is to be found of the
monotheistic idea, the condemnation of ceremonial and the emphasis on the
ethical side. Thus we are prepared for the possibility that the solution of our
problem is to be sought in a special psychological situation. (109-10)
Freud goes on to reject this analogy as inadequate to explain his monotheism
hypothesis, instead falling back on his abiding interest in childhood neuroses. In this he
alludes to the more complex idea of Nachträglichkeit. Anne Whitehead explains how
Nachträglichkeit informs Caruth’s thought:
For Freud, the concept refers to the ways in which certain experiences,
impressions and memory traces are revised at a later date in order to correspond
with fresh experiences or with the attainment of a new stage of development.
Freud’s conception involves a radical rethinking of the causality and temporality
of memory. The traumatic incident is not fully acknowledged at the time that it
occurs and only becomes an event at some later point of intense emotional crisis.
Caruth’s understanding of trauma reworks “deferred action” as belatedness and
models itself on Freud’s conception of the non-linear temporal relation to the
past. (6)
However, this interpretation of Nachträglichkeit is arguably a distortion of Freud’s
meaning. Whitehead and Caruth’s account posits the occurrence of an initial “traumatic
incident”, but for Freud, the trauma arises rather through the connection between two
separate moments in time. As Leys explains, in Freud’s conception of Nachträglichkeit,
trauma was constituted by a relationship between two events or experiences – a
first event that was not necessarily traumatic because it came too early in the
child’s development to be understood and assimilated, and a second event that
also was not inherently traumatic but that triggered a memory of the first event
that only then was given traumatic meaning and hence repressed. (20)
This is rather different from the idea of belated possession by traumatic memories.
Leys criticizes Caruth for selective quoting of Freud to construct new meaning from his
ideas. For Leys, Caruth’s interpretation of Nachträglichkeit is “stripped of the idea of
the retroactive conferral of meaning on past sexual experiences and reduced instead to
the idea of literal if belated repetition of the traumatic event” (270-1).
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This, I would argue, results from Caruth’s reliance on Kolk’s theory of the literal truth
of “flashback” traumatic memories. As discussed above, Kolk asserts that traumatic
events are not remembered in the usual way, but instead are dissociated from normal
thought, and return “intrusively” of their own accord. In Remembering Trauma,
McNally seeks to question this entire frame of reference, which relies on twin
assumptions of dissociation and forgetting. Synthesizing clinical psychology, cognitive
neuroscience and developmental psychology, McNally makes three counter-assertions
to the orthodoxy of trauma:
First, people remember horrific experiences all too well. Victims are seldom
incapable of remembering their trauma. Second, people sometimes do not think
about disturbing events for long periods of time, only to be reminded of them
later. However, events that are experienced as overwhelmingly traumatic at the
time of their occurrence rarely slip from awareness. Third, there is no reason to
postulate a special mechanism of repression or dissociation to explain why
people may not think about disturbing experiences for long periods. A failure to
think about something does not entail an inability to remember it (amnesia). (2)
This argument implicitly challenges the Janetian idea that traumatic memories are
“stored” differently from other recollections. Moreover, McNally’s criticism
undermines the central concept of dissociation, notwithstanding its appearance in
psychiatric textbooks. The field, it would seem, is far from unified.
A further problem of Kolk’s argument is his reliance on Janet’s concept of “narrative
memory”. Janet considered remembering to be a “creative act” (qtd. in van der Kolk,
“Pierre Janet” 368) in which we assemble “the chapters in our personal history” during
an “action of telling a story” (qtd. in van der Kolk, “Intrusive Past” 176). This
argument assumes a linear temporality to memory, which has been criticized by, for
example, the philosopher Ian Hacking. In Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and
the Sciences of Memory (1995), Hacking asserts that memory is in fact composed of
images and scenes, and uses this to challenge the view that “flashbacks” are any
different from other recollections:
[. . .] those who describe remembering as narrative often intend to undercut any
privilege of memory as a means of getting at the truth about the past. But in fact
they create a space for another kind of memory, a special kind of memory,
which is then, by its advocates, given special rights. My approach says that their
logical error begins when one identifies remembering with narration. That
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makes a flashback something whose very nature is different from other memory.
But if recollection is to be compared to thinking of scenes and episodes (and
describing or narrating them on occasion), then it is not intrinsically different
from other remembering. There is no reason to believe that the flashback
experience is better at getting at the unvarnished truth than any other type of
remembering. (253)
This debate between image and narration points to the possible connection between
photography and memory. Freud often used the photographic process as an analogy for
the workings of memory, and of the psyche in general. In Moses and Monotheism, for
instance, he compared childhood memories that resurface in later life to forgotten,
undeveloped photographs that can still be turned into prints years later (198-9). J. J.
Long summarizes the results of this line of thought for contemporary trauma theorists:
“The psychic processes by which the past is remembered can thus be seen as somehow
duplicating the process of photography [and] the process of photography corresponds to
the sudden recall of buried memories after a period of latency” (126). Stefanie Harris,
applying Kolk’s view of traumatic memory, argues that the “discontinuous temporal
structure” of trauma may also be applied to photographs, which represent an “arrested”
instant in time that lacks the continuity of moving pictures (387). Ulrich Baer echoes
this and, adding the Laub idea of non-registration, argues that, like the “puzzlingly
accurate imprinting on the mind of an overwhelming reality” found in trauma,
photography provides a “mechanically recorded instant that was not necessarily
registered by the subject’s own consciousness” (8). However, this line of thinking,
while potentially productive for the study of photography, is less helpful in explaining
how memory works. Neurological science has moved on since Freud’s hypothetical
metaphors, and would be unlikely to compare the simple mechanics of a camera with
the complexities of the human brain.
Yet another problem with the distinction between “flashbacks” and other types of
memory lies in its therapeutic aspect. Kolk argues that Janet’s purpose in defining
narrative memory was to enable those suffering dissociative states to re-integrate their
intrusive memories and thereby achieve psychic health. However, Leys contends that
this interpretation relies on a highly selective reading of Janet. She shows that the
apparent desire to convert “traumatic memory” into “narrative memory” is contradicted
in other papers by Janet which instead advocate “excision”, “acceptation” and
“resignation”. Indeed, Leys interprets Janet’s corpus as emphasizing not the healing of
49
trauma but its forgetting. She argues that “for Janet, narrated recollection was
insufficient for the cure. A supplementary action was required, one that involved a
process of “liquidation” that, terminologically, sounded suspiciously like “exorcism” or
“forgetting” (116).
The contradictions of Janet’s work are, Leys argues, echoed throughout the history of
therapeutic approaches to trauma. For Leys, notions of trauma have always been, and
continue to be, inherently unstable, owing to a constant oscillation between “mimetic”
and “anti-mimetic” approaches. The mimetic view of trauma, she explains, assumes the
testifying victim to have an element of unreliability, because his or her memory is a
hypnotic imitation or process of “acting out”. Meanwhile the antimimetic school
(exemplified by Kolk and Caruth) imagines the speaker as an aloof spectator to their
traumatic memory who can reliably represent it as a literal historic truth,
uncontaminated by subjectivity or identification with any perpetrator. Leys asserts that
while most theorists of trauma have attempted to advocate one of these over the other,
and in some cases, such as with Freud, moved between them during their career, the two
modes are inextricable from each other (35-40).
Leys’ book includes sustained criticism of the work of Caruth, especially for the latter’s
equation of trauma with literal truth. Leys’ attack has elicited a furious response from
Shoshana Felman in an extended footnote from her 2002 book The Juridical
Unconscious. Felman broadly attacks Leys’ analysis as being derivative and reductive.
More interestingly, Felman reveals a quasi-mystical belief in the radical unknowability
of trauma. She argues that Leys’ opposition between mimesis and anti-mimesis
“reduces the surprise and the unknown of trauma to the (purely academic) known. It
extrapolates in fact from the complexity and from the foreignness of the unconscious an
estheticizing and familiarizing terminology of consciousness” (178 n.3). Felman’s
underlying point is that trauma is inherently resistant to the sort of “moralizing” and
“normalizing” (180 n.3) attempted by Leys. Felman talks of “the radicality of trauma
itself – the way in which (precisely) the event of trauma destabilizes the security of
knowledge and strikes at the foundation of the institutional prerogatives of what is
known” (181 n.3). Leys, according to Felman, “in principle denies the consequences by
which trauma refuses to be pigeonholed and fundamentally subverts our frames of
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reference” (181 n.3). Trauma is “the surprise and the unknown” (178 n.3), a
“bewildering phenomenon” (182 n.3) that can never be fully explained.
This argument points to a central contradiction in trauma theory between, on the one
hand, the Janetian emphasis on re-integrating the trauma into narrative memory, which
leads in the work of Laub and Kolk to the possibility of healing through reclaiming the
truth, and on the other, trauma’s essential incomprehensibility and inaccessibility, as
asserted by Felman and Caruth, whose work is built on the unstable foundations of the
first group. Literality and incomprehensibility are, I would argue, incompatible
concepts. The work of Caruth exemplifies this inherent contradiction, in particular her
comments on testimony. Though she believes in the “truth” of traumatic memory,
Caruth does not favour the healing through talking/narrativization approach as it may
interfere with its sanctity. Because “trauma [. . .] evoke[s] the difficult truth of a history
that is constituted by the very incomprehensibility of its occurrence”, the flashback
memory experienced by the survivor conveys both “the truth of the event, and the truth
of its incomprehensibility”, leading to a dilemma of sacrilege in which “talking it out” in
order to effect a cure will lose the memory’s specificity and precision, the “force of its
affront to understanding” (153-4, emphasis in original). Caruth cites Claude
Lanzmann’s Shoah as an example of how to get around this problem, noting the filmmaker’s avowed determination not to understand, only listen. “The attempt to gain
access to a traumatic history, then, is also the project of listening beyond the pathology
of individual suffering, to the reality of a history that in its crises can only be perceived
in unassimilable forms” (156). Caruth, like Felman, thus paradoxically argues that
trauma is simultaneously incomprehensible and the key to “gain[ing] access” to the
past.
Such approaches have been criticized by Dominick LaCapra as tending towards the
traumatic sublime. Referring to the passage quoted above, in which Caruth warns
against sacrilegiously diluting the force of the trauma, LaCapra writes: “Caruth here
seems dangerously close to conflating absence (of absolute foundations and total
meaning or knowledge) with loss and even sacralizing, or making sublime, the
compulsive repetition of acting-out of a traumatic past” (History 121). This argument is
based on LaCapra’s important distinctions between absence and loss, and between
structural and historical trauma. Losses, he points out, are distinct and factual, while
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absence is more generalized and tends towards the mythical or sublime. Losses occur in
actual historical trauma, such as, for example, the Holocaust, while absence corresponds
to structural trauma, as with every child’s separation from the womb and mother.
Confusion between the two has consequences both for the individual and for society:
When absence and loss are conflated, melancholic paralysis or manic agitation
may set in, and the significance or force of particular historical losses (for
example, those of apartheid or the Shoah) may be obfuscated or rashly
generalised. As a consequence one encounters the dubious ideas that everyone
(including perpetrators or collaborators) is a victim, that all history is trauma, or
that we all share a pathological public sphere or a ‘wound culture’. (Writing 64)
This latter phrase originates in Mark Seltzer’s article about public fascination with serial
killers, “Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere” (1997). Seltzer
defines wound culture as “the public fascination with torn and opened bodies and torn
and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (3)
which leads to an over-identification with suffering. The idea of all history being
trauma, meanwhile, LaCapra attributes mainly to Caruth and her assertion that “a
history can only be grasped in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence”. Against this
tendency to conflate absence and loss, LaCapra urges “working-through”. This concept,
though Freudian and therapeutic in origin, means for LaCapra not a process of healing
or closure but more of acknowledging the pain of the past and turning with hope
towards the future. Working-through thus “counteracts the tendency to sacralize trauma
or to convert it into a founding or sublime event – a traumatic sublime or transfigured
moment of blank insight and revelatory abjection” (History 123).
Another version of the traumatic sublime relates to the Lacanian view of child
development. Roth and Salas, in Disturbing Remains: Memory, History, and Crisis in
the Twentieth Century (2001), describe this tendency: “For some, trauma is a basic
feature of consciousness. Awakening to the real is itself said to be traumatic and thus to
undermine the unity and stability of the individual subject” (2). Such a view has
political consequences. Edkins, for example, adapts this version of trauma – the
irruption of the real into the symbolic order – into a call for political action, thereby
sacralizing traumatic events as moments not of abjection but of “revelation” (5). For
Edkins, trauma alone allows us to glimpse the real and break out of the symbolic order,
from the linear time of the “political” into the “trauma time” of active “politics” (15).
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However, Edkins’ thesis, like Caruth’s, again suggests the incompatibility of notions of
narrativization of traumatic memory with its supposed resistance to comprehension.
This is seen in her opposition to the normalization of trauma that occurs in, for example,
state-led memorialization projects, as these involve a “re-inscription into linear
narratives [that] generally depoliticises” (15). Adopting phrases from Slavoj Žižek’s
For They Know Not What They Do (1991), she argues that
there is an alternative, that of encircling the trauma. We cannot try to address
the trauma directly without risking its gentrification. We cannot remember it as
something that took place in time, because this would neutralise it. All we can
do is “to encircle again and again the site” of the trauma, “to mark it in its very
impossibility”. (15)
Žižek’s word “impossibility” may take its place alongside Felman’s “bewildering”,
“surpris[ing]” and “unknown”, and Caruth’s “incomprehensibility” and
“unassimab[ility]”, in the adjectival pantheon of trauma. That this lexicon resembles
the rhetoric of the Holocaust, which as my Introduction noted includes notions of the
“incomprehensible”, “incommensurable”, and “ineffable”, is not surprising, given that
the Holocaust has become the quintessential traumatic event of recent history.
Moreover, these negative descriptions fundamentally clash with the simultaneously held
view that traumatic memories represent a positive and literal truth about the past.
A way out of this dead end, I would argue, is to move beyond problematic notions of
literality. We may grant the overwhelming power and importance of traumatic
symptoms in war veterans, sexual abuse victims and Holocaust survivors without
having to assume the unimpeachable accuracy of their memories. Traumatic events
may be relived time and again by survivors, whether “dissociatively” or not, but it does
not follow that their memories are any more reliable than those of non-victims. Indeed,
Laub himself cites the example of an Auschwitz survivor with an inaccurate memory of
the failed rebellion there. This woman remembered four chimneys being set ablaze,
whereas historical research suggests that it was only one. For Laub this merely
highlights the unhelpfulness of empirical views of truth when confronted with the
overwhelming truth of traumatic memory, an argument considered further in Chapter 3
of the present study. For now, it will be apparent how such examples problematize any
notion of literal verisimilitude of recall by victims of traumatic events. Indeed, in their
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Introduction to Trauma and Memory (1996), editors Williams and Banyard cite a
growing body of evidence that proves these memories to be subject to the same
distortion as any other, despite the evidence that traumatic memory does indeed work
differently, showing that these facts are not inherently incompatible:
There is also a profusion of research on suggestibility and memory that shows
that memory is reconstructive and imperfect, that memory can be influenced and
distorted, that confabulation can occur to fill in memory gaps, and that subjects
can be persuaded to believe they heard, saw, or experienced events that they did
not. Inaccurate memories can be strongly believed and convincingly described.
A number of studies have been conducted to assess directly the implantation of
memories for events that would be traumatic had they occurred [. . .]. [. . .] most
studies indicate that 15% to 25% of individuals will, after several attempts,
report memories for fictitious events. (xii)
This may seem an artificial exercise, but a similarly problematic result occurs in the
normal run of treatment for trauma. As Leys notes: “The hypnotic suggestibility of the
victim of dissociation or PTSD makes the patient’s testimony about the historical truth
of the traumatic origin inherently suspect owing to the potential for hypnotic
confabulation and ‘false memories’” (38).
Nevertheless, the idea of the unimpeachable truth of traumatic memories persists. One
reason for this is the desire for justice and retribution. In contemporary society, it
seems, perpetrators must be punished, “truth and reconciliation” must be achieved, and
events like the Holocaust must be memorialized. If memories are seen to be unreliable,
leading to distortion and forgetting, such projects become harder to sustain. Moreover,
they also rely on the assumption that trauma can account for collective as well as
individual experience. Herman, for example, makes an explicit link between personal
and community trauma, arguing that there is a correspondence between the repression
of painful memories by individuals and society’s avoidance of unpalatable facts: “The
knowledge of horrible events periodically intrudes into public awareness, but is rarely
retained for long. Denial, repression, and dissociation operate on a social as well as an
individual level” (2). Thus, for Herman: “Remembering and telling the truth about
terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the
healing of individual victims” (1). However, this can only be achieved if the truthful
memory is available for retrieval, a point which does not necessarily follow, troubling
though this is for those who rightly wish to punish perpetrators for their crimes.
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Another example of research into collective trauma motivated by a desire for political
justice is Kai Erikson’s analysis of the reaction of small communities to local disasters,
such as floods and industrial gas leaks. Such groups, Erikson argues, may be said to be
traumatized in two ways. First, they may suffer “damage to the tissues that hold human
groups intact”. Second, they may experience the “creation of social climates,
communal moods, that come to dominate a group’s spirit” (190). Communities may, as
a result, develop a different worldview in that they no longer screen out the dangers
around them, living in a perpetual state of anxiety and fear.
A more theoretical example of the transference of trauma from the individual to the
collective sphere is Andreas Huyssen’s psychoanalysis of the entire German nation in
his chapter “Rewritings and New Beginnings” from Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests
and the Politics of Memory (2003). Huyssen asserts that post-war German society has
suffered a multi-layered trauma consisting of the humiliation of total defeat, Holocaust
guilt, expulsion from the East, and the aftermath of destruction caused by Allied
bombardment. This trauma, Huyssen argues, has manifested itself as a “repetitive
obsession” with “new beginnings”. In 1945, 1968 and 1990, German society
reverberated with ideas of “Neuanfänge [fresh start], Nullpunke [zero point], tabula
rasa [clean slate], Wendepunkte [turning point]” (144). Huyssen suggests that this is a
result of “the double-edged desire simultaneously to remember and to avoid the past”
(145-6). He goes on: “All survivors of traumatic experiences face the difficult task of
new beginnings. But the tension between traumatic symptom and new beginning will
necessarily remain unresolved, generating ever new attempts at resolution” (151). Here
Huyssen draws on the orthodox psychoanalytical observation that people who fail to
work through their trauma are liable to suffer re-experiencing symptoms after a period
of latency, the goal of therapy being to resolve this and stop the repetition. This
argument rests on the assumption that a clinical model may be extended to the
consciousness of an entire nation, which for Huyssen is revealed not just by sociopolitical events but also by the literature that nation produces. Indeed, it is from postwar German literature that Huyssen draws much of his evidence: “Like the public
culture from which postwar German literature emerged and that it shaped in turn, this
literature lives off repetitions, reinscriptions, and rewritings that make any historical
55
account of postwar literary developments as a stable progression through the decades
inherently problematic” (156).
Huyssen thus moves from psychoanalysis to socio-historical theory, and thence to
literature. But is literature explicable through the concept of trauma? Are the
movements of literary history attributable to a collective version of traumatic
“flashbacks” to an unassimilated memory of the past? Does this somehow explain the
fact and nature of contemporary Holocaust narratives? What does this say about the
role of the author in relation to the past, especially if he or she took no part in that past?
What is the relationship between writing and trauma? These are difficult questions, and
ones for which only provisional answers may be offered within the scope of the present
study. Nevertheless, I wish to suggest that the paradoxes, contradictions and
uncertainties of trauma theory, as detailed above, render any use of that theory to
explain the workings of literature inherently problematic.
An obvious example of the inapplicability of certain views of traumatic memory to
literature is the case of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s false Holocaust memoir Fragments.
This affair graphically shows how traumatic memory does not always correspond to
truth. Wilkomirski is by all accounts genuinely traumatized by his memories of being a
child in Nazi concentration camps, yet these recollections have been proved to be false.
In this instance, traumatic memory has led to the production of a narrative that is an
inherently deceptive work of fiction (as I argue in Chapter 3 of the present study). Of
course, this is a rare case, and other contemporary Holocaust narratives do not suffer
from the same peculiar set of circumstances. In an article on literature and Holocaust
remembrance, Nicola King explores “the ways in which fiction might be a ‘site of
memory’ as the generation who directly experienced it begins to die out” (94).
However, as King notes, the contemporary novelist inhabits a problematic position of
witness after the event. This may be resolved with reference to a model in which the
author takes on a sense of “responsibility” akin to “the task of the therapist” (97) by
restoring the lost or fractured memories of survivors (real or imagined) to narrative
coherence. This in turn corresponds with the Janetian view of trauma in memory as
personal life story. As Kolk writes, “Traumatic memories are the unassimilated scraps
of overwhelming experiences, which need to be integrated with existing mental
schemes, and be transformed into narrative language” (“Intrusive” 176). If this is so,
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then to narrate the memory of traumatic events in, for example, a novel, may, by
extension, have some kind of curative value. Perhaps there is a parallel to be drawn
between, on the one hand, the literary triad of writer, reader and subject, and on the
other, the therapeutic situation of psychiatrist, patient and trauma.
Such a comparison is certainly implied in the work of Dori Laub. Laub asserts that
when he interviews survivors, decades after the event, they are in some sense bearing
witness to the event for the first time. This is because the Nazis “brutally imposed upon
the victims a delusional ideology whose grandiose coercive pressure totally excluded
and eliminated the possibility of an unviolated, unencumbered, and thus sane, point of
reference in the witness” (“Event” 81). Laub thus extends his assertion that “massive
trauma precludes its registration” to argue that the Holocaust was, as the title of his
chapter has it, “An Event Without a Witness”. However, he suggests that through the
quasi-therapeutic situation of the video interview, which preserves survivor memory in
the archive, a belated form of witness may be achieved – one which, moreover, neatly
corresponds to the concept of latency:
It is not by chance that these testimonies – even if they were engendered during
the event – become receivable only today; it is not by chance that it is only now,
belatedly, that the event begins to be historically grasped and seen. I wish to
emphasize this historical gap which the event created in the collective
witnessing. This emphasis does not invalidate in any way the power and the
value of the individual testimonies, but it underscores the fact that these
testimonies were not transmittable, and integratable, at the time. (84, emphasis
in original)
Thus not only were the traumatic events unassimilable at the time, they could not have
been “transmitted” to others until the latency period had elapsed. Laub alleges that noone spoke about the Holocaust in the immediate post-war period, a silence that, he
argues, was partly the result of the continuing delusional sensibility imposed by the
Nazis on its victims. It is only now, with the help of people such as himself, that
witness and healing may begin.
This may seem a highly contentious argument, relying on unverified hypotheses about
what people did or did not do or say in the post-war world. But Laub goes even further,
arguing, by way of analogy with the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, that members
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of the present generation are “innocent children” who can see through the Nazi-imposed
delusion, because they are “removed enough from the experience to begin to ask
questions” (83). This opposition between survivors and later generations appears highly
problematic, especially considering that Laub, as a survivor himself, appears to be
representing both groups. However, it does articulate a view that might help to justify
certain forms of Holocaust representation. Could the analogy be extended to
contemporary writers who have taken as their subject the traumas of the twentieth
century? Are writers born after World War II “innocent children” with a clearer
perspective on events than those who lived through them? This would certainly invert
the orthodoxy that testimonial literature has more value than fiction. I would argue,
however, that this genre question is less important than the beliefs about traumatic
memory that authors carry with them when writing their narratives. As this chapter has
attempted to show, these beliefs may rest on shaky foundations. The concept of trauma,
I have argued, is politically determined, clinically controversial, and theoretically
confused in its tendency towards sublimating horrific experiences, rewriting older texts
to its own ends, and making contradictory claims about truthfulness and
incomprehensibility. Writers of contemporary Holocaust narratives may be tempted to
believe in the literal and unmediated truth of traumatic memories, or even in their
untouchable sublimity, as a result of a desire to respect the suffering of victims and
survivors, but without an objective view that includes truth-testing this attitude of
respect risks becoming over-identification. In the next chapter of the present study I
suggest that a version of empathy, developed from the work of LaCapra, may explain
how some texts, such as those by Sebald and Foer, work to avert this difficulty, through
a gesture which acknowledges the potential for identification while seeking nevertheless
to maintain a level of objective distance.
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Chapter 2
Resolving the problems of identification: LaCapra, Gadamer, self-reflexivity and
transgenerational empathy
When dealing with traumatic events like the Holocaust, which touch us and arouse our
sympathy, a degree of identification with victims is perhaps inevitable. However, this
seems inappropriate and ethically dubious, given the gulf between our experience and
theirs. Nevertheless, instead of repudiating this instinct, or pretending that it does not
exist, it may be more productive to acknowledge and harness such feelings while
ensuring that they are tempered by an element of objective distance. One way to do this
is to draw a distinction between simple identification and the more complex gesture of
empathy. Such is the view of Dominick LaCapra, who argues that “empathic
unsettlement” (Writing 78) is necessary when approaching the Holocaust from the
position of outsider. Empathy is a key term for LaCapra, who defines it as “an affective
relation, rapport, or bond with the other recognized and respected as other” (Writing
212-3). While LaCapra is chiefly concerned with the role of the historian, this chapter
will develop his ideas to show how they may be productively applied to contemporary
Holocaust narratives. I argue that the ethical and epistemological problems of
identification may be resolved to an extent through what I call “transgenerational
empathy”, an approach to the past that is self-reflexive, draws on ideas of time, memory
and generations, and moves both towards and away from the victims of the past in a
simultaneous gesture of proximity and distance. My approach also situates LaCaprian
empathy in the space opened up by Gadamer’s concept of the “fusion of horizons”
between past and present. In later chapters I show how transgenerational empathy
corresponds to an extent with the narrative strategies employed by W. G. Sebald and
Jonathan Safran Foer.
Empathy has a dual structure: it is the ability simultaneously to share and understand the
feelings of another. As such, its modern meaning is entirely different from that of
sympathy, which connotes feelings of pity or sorrow for another’s misfortune. Later in
this chapter, I trace the history of this distinction, as it helps explain the development of
empathy in various discourses from the eighteenth century onwards. First, however, I
wish to make a crucial distinction between empathy and identification. In a very broad
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sense, identification may be considered to correspond to the “shared feelings” aspect of
empathy, while lacking the other element of understanding. In psychoanalytic theory,
identification refers to the process by which a patient may unconsciously incorporate
attributes of another person into his or her personality, while in over-identification an
excessive level of this incorporation leads to the denigration of the patient’s
individuality or subjectivity. Identification, then, is best understood as a pathological
condition or tendency with potentially undesirable results (though as we will see, not
everyone agrees that over-incorporation of the other is wrong or unhelpful).
In the field of Holocaust studies, particularly where it intersects with trauma theory,
identification has emerged as a major issue. As Geoffrey Hartman noted in 1995: “The
predicament [for those who consider the traumatic past] is how to acknowledge the
passionate, suffering, affectional side of human nature without sympathy turning into
over-identification” (“On Traumatic” 545). Such a transformation might occur, warns
Hartman, if one makes the mistake of thinking about trauma as a universal experience
related to loss of the Lacanian “real”. This echoes LaCapra’s warning against
conflating absence with loss, as described in my last chapter. For Hartman, such ideas
can lead to “a temptation to politicize the fact of trauma and to broaden, even
universalize, the perspective of victimhood” (546). Beyond the warning to theorists of
trauma, Hartman’s implication is clear: it is impermissible for non-victims to identify
with victims, especially Holocaust victims, whose experience and suffering must not be
subjected to comparison or relativization. Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, quoting the
title of a poem by Karen Gershon, gives a more succinct version of this warning: “I was
not there”.
However, there are degrees of not-there-ness. Hartman and Gershon are both survivors
from the Kindertransport; Hilberg has spent his working life documenting and
evaluating the extermination of European Jewry during the Third Reich. The point is
that their relationship to the event is always an issue, always a consideration both for
their working practice and for those who read and evaluate their output. The same goes,
of course, for writers and readers of fictional narratives of the Holocaust. One aim of
this study is to show that the more successful authors of such narratives foreground their
knowledge of and engagement with this and related issues in a self-reflexive manner;
indeed, this is a vital component of what I call transgenerational empathy.
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Nevertheless, fiction arguably contains greater dangers of identification than, say,
criticism or historiography. Traditionally, identification with characters or situations
has been seen as crucial to the success of a story, especially from the reader’s
perspective. However, this represents a narrowly realist view of fiction which is
increasingly under challenge from more knowing forms of writing, sometimes gathered
under the heading “postmodern”. Thus the question arises as to whether such forms
resolve the problem of identification and to what extent.
Robert Eaglestone addresses this issue directly in The Holocaust and the Postmodern
(2004), arguing that while fiction cannot escape the problems associated with
identification, testimonial accounts can and do. He reaches this conclusion through a
detailed debate about ethics and epistemology. First, he asserts that postmodern thought
may represent a solution to the problem of identification, insofar as it challenges the
assumptions that lead to ethically dubious attitudes to the Holocaust. These
assumptions include the “metaphysics of comprehension,” which is “both the desire for
and the methods by and through which Western thought, in many different ways,
comprehends, seizes, or consumes what is other to it and so reduces the other to itself”
(4). Identification is a key component of this process, as it “often leads to the
‘consumption’ and reduction of otherness, the assimilation of others’ experience into
one’s own frameworks” (6). In the case of the Holocaust, Eaglestone argues,
identification represents an illicit attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible, a danger
which arises each time we are confronted with representations of the event:
We who come after the Holocaust and know about it only through
representations are frequently and with authority told that it is incomprehensible.
However, the representations seem to demand us to do exactly that, to
comprehend it, to grasp the experience, to imagine the suffering, through
identifying with those who suffered. (19)
Eaglestone’s articulation of this dilemma reveals an interesting definition of
identification. He appears to conflate “comprehend”, “grasp” and “imagine” into a
subset under the overall header of “identifying”. This seems a rather limiting account of
the available options for the reader. Are imagining and comprehending inextricable?
Must one imagine in order to comprehend? In Chapter 4 of the present study, I show
how W. G. Sebald’s narratives foreground this very problem of imagining, by
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consciously limiting its extent and imposing layers of distance. This suggests that
contemplation of the other need not always lead to identification, which as I will show
may be separated, to an extent, from comprehension through the application of a
specific, distinctive notion of empathy. Empathy’s simultaneous gesture of sharing and
understanding the feelings of others keeps the notions of identification and
comprehension distinct, while also avoiding the necessity to choose between one and
the other.
Eaglestone, meanwhile, goes on to identify two issues that arise from the problem of
identification and representation. First, he asserts that it is not epistemologically or
psychologically possible to know what it was like for real Holocaust victims or
survivors; and secondly, that the seeking of such knowledge is (or should be) ethically
proscribed. This idea of “illicit comprehension” (23), however, seems to contain a
contradiction or paradox: if comprehension/identification is impossible, why is it
necessary to warn against it? If the attempt is futile, what harm can it do? For
Eaglestone, this amounts to the abstract ethical problem of “consumption” of the other.
It seems that people can and do attempt to identify with others’ suffering, and
Eaglestone’s aim is to limit this by establishing boundaries.
To further this aim, he defines “testimony” as a genre, one which has advantages over
others, especially fiction:
Many forms of prose writing encourage identification and while testimony
cannot but do this, it at the same time aims to prohibit identification, on
epistemological grounds (a reader really cannot become, or become identified
with, the narrator of a testimony: any such identification is an illusion) and on
ethical grounds (a reader should not become identified with a narrator of a
testimony, as it reduces and ‘normalizes’ or consumes the otherness of the
narrator’s experience and the illusion that such an identification creates is
possibly pernicious). (42-3)
Eaglestone’s assertion that “any such identification is an illusion” raises the question of
the Wilkomirski affair. As I show in Chapter 3 of the present study, Binjamin
Wilkomirski’s false memoir Fragments (1995) came about in part through the author’s
over-identification with real others’ testimonies, which he appropriated for himself,
incorporating them into his own identity. Though this is an “illusion”, it appears that it
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is nevertheless very real to him. Put another way: one can identify with a testifier or
testimony if one wants to; calling this an “illusion” does not change one’s subjective
experience. To say one “should not” is another matter, and perhaps suggests that the
real issue for Eaglestone is the problem of responsibility – a responsibility towards, for
example, the ethical imperative to respect others’ suffering. But it is not entirely clear
where the responsibility lies. On the one hand, Eaglestone argues that the testimonial
form itself “rejects the pleasures of identification” (38) through its “gaps, shifts, breaks,
and ruptures” (41), while on the other hand it appears that it is the way one approaches
testimony that resolves the problem: “To read these texts as testimonies, to read the
genre, is to refuse the identification” (40). Who has agency here – author or reader? Or
the text itself?
Notwithstanding these unresolved issues, testimony is held up by Eaglestone as an
ethically superior genre. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that it does not wholly reject
identification:
[. . .] ‘doubleness’ is central to the genre of testimony: the texts lead to
identification and away from it simultaneously. This stress between centrifugal
and centripetal forces is played out, but not resolved, in the texts of testimonies
and it is this that characterises the genre of testimony. (43)
For Eaglestone this “stress” can only exist in testimony, not fiction, because “the
reading that fiction requires too often demands the sort of process of identification that
‘consumes’ the events” (132). Novels, he argues, tend to encourage us to identify with
ethically dubious subject positions, such as perpetrator, passive victim, or bystander,
leading to a “tension – between the demand of fiction that we identify and the demand
of the Holocaust that we cannot and should not – that unbalances even the most subtle
of [. . .] novels” (132). Eaglestone’s opposition of the categories “fiction” and
“testimony” appears to elide the possibility that fictionalization is present in all forms of
writing, including (perhaps especially) autobiographical forms. Moreover, his argument
implicitly discounts the possibility of narratives that sit somewhere between fiction and
testimony. In my chapters on Sebald and Foer, I show how certain contemporary
Holocaust narratives may be put into this category, and how they enact, through
transgenerational empathy, something akin to Eaglestone’s “doubleness”, through a
simultaneous action of proximity and distance. Indeed, the characteristics of testimony
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that Eaglestone describes, such as “interruptions” to a past narrative by a narrator in the
present, or “disruptions in [. . .] chronology”, are characteristic of contemporary
literature in general, making the distinction between genres even harder to sustain.
However, Eaglestone adds a further component to his genre of testimony. He argues
that it is distinguished by “an existential uncovering or revelation” in the form of a
“trace”, which is “the grounds for that which refuses comprehension (here, through
identification): it is the trace of incomprehensible other, the witness” (70). Through this
idea Eaglestone seeks to resolve a paradox, namely that of the critic (Eaglestone) who
makes a gesture of comprehension (through writing) towards that which he has named
as incomprehensible (the Holocaust). Thus Eaglestone engages with the contradiction
inherent in the search for the truth of a past which is simultaneously defined as beyond
reach. As I showed in my last chapter, this contradiction is at the heart of trauma
theory, and has been criticized as tending towards sublimation. Indeed, Eaglestone’s
characterisation of testimony as “revelation” echoes Jenny Edkins’ valorisation of the
traumatic moment as the catalyst for political action. Though their meaning of the term
is different, both partake of a discourse which appears to gesture towards what LaCapra
has called “the tendency to sacralize trauma or to convert it into a founding or sublime
event” (History in Transit 123).
Holocaust and trauma studies, then, coincide in Eaglestone’s analysis of the problem of
identification. But this does not mean that all approaches grounded in those fields will
reach the same conclusion. Ernst van Alphen’s thesis in Caught by History: Holocaust
Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (1997) represents the ethical
reverse to Eaglestone’s position, arguing in favour of all kinds of identification with
Holocaust participants, even perpetrators. Van Alphen begins by asserting that
figurative, imaginative artworks are more useful than historical or factual accounts for
representing the Holocaust, as they can enable what he calls “Holocaust effects”.
Drawing on trauma studies and speech-act theory, he suggests that these performative
“reenactments” (presentations, not re-presentations) enable the audience to “keep in
touch” with the past in an unmediated manner. “When I call something a Holocaust
effect, I mean to say that we are not confronted with a representation of the Holocaust,
but that we, as viewers or readers, experience directly a certain aspect of the Holocaust
or of Nazism, of that which led to the Holocaust” (10). That this is a species of
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identification is clear from van Alphen’s introductory remarks, in which he looks back
to his schooldays in 1960s Holland:
[. . .] war and Holocaust narratives were dull to me, almost dulled me, as a
young child because they were told in such a way that I was not allowed to have
my own response to them. My response, in other words, was already culturally
prescribed or narratively programmed. Fleeting, idiosyncratic identifications I
might have with perpetrators instead of with victims were prohibited by the
official framings, hence were impossible. The narration of this past had no
ambiguities; moral positions were fixed. (2)
Thus van Alphen values the process of identification with morally dubious subject
positions for its potentially productive effect rather than allowing its proscription by
ethical imperatives, in a direct contradiction of Eaglestone’s attempt to limit such moves
through criticism of fictional narrative. I would argue that neither extreme is the best
way to approach Holocaust representation, and that transgenerational empathy may
represent a middle ground that avoids the presumption of “reexperiencing” someone
else’s past while nevertheless acknowledging (and tempering) such desires to commune
with the dead.
The contention that one should actively seek to identify with Holocaust participants,
rather than avoid or ignore such attachments, forms the subject of Emily Prager’s Eve’s
Tattoo (1992). In this intriguing novel, forty-year-old New York journalist Eve gets the
camp number of an anonymous Auschwitz inmate tattooed on her arm. Eve calls this
woman “Eva”, embracing her as an alter-ego. She wants to memorialize the unknown
victim by celebrating her life rather than her death, and take the woman into the twentyfirst century by literally embodying her in the present. Each time one of her friends
asks about the tattoo she invents a different life history of Eva. These biographies are
composites based on Eve’s extensive reading of Holocaust witness accounts and,
especially, testimonies from women in 1930s Germany. Indeed, Eve’s strange project
of identification has a strong feminist agenda; she even compares Aryan brutality to
more general notions of male abuse towards women. Many of the “Evas”, the subjects
of her invented biographies, try to resist Nazi persecution but all fail and, in her stories,
eventually become the Auschwitz victim of the photograph.
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After her first improvised life history, Eve is pleased with the reaction of her usually
frivolous friends:
Everyone had identified. For a few minutes the tattoo had jolted them from the
lethe of middle-class life and they suddenly looked not sophisticated or cynical,
not fed up or bored, not played-out or wired, just human, exposed, their
expressions softened with an empathy they would never have acknowledged that
they could feel. (29)
This passage is notable for its conflation of identification with empathy, a common
confusion which I explore later in this chapter. It also alleges that identification is an
antidote to ignorance. Eve herself embarks on her bizarre episode after finding out for
the first time that the Holocaust did not only target Jews, and that the first victims of gas
chambers were mental patients. This “one little fact opened doors in Eve’s mind that led
her to getting the tattoo. Doors of identification, doors of terror, doors that led to rooms
of questions she had never thought to ask, from perspectives she had never considered”
(31). Thus the breaking down of religious and ethnic barriers is figured as helping
identification and thus understanding, which, as in Eaglestone’s account, appear to be
conflated by Eve. However, the issue is complicated by Eve’s lover Charles, who reacts
violently to the tattoo. He turns out to be a Frenchman whose parents collaborated with
the occupying German forces during the war, and it is only when Eve’s tattoo is
removed in a freak accident that they are reconciled. Thus while Eve and her friends,
who have no personal connection to the Holocaust, are alleged to benefit from her
identificatory fantasies, Charles, a man with painful family secrets, refuses to join in the
project. Eve’s attempts to make him “understand” by explaining the facts she gleans
from Holocaust literature fall on deaf ears. Thus Prager subtly undermines the assertion
of her heroine that all identification is of positive value.
Prager’s novel, which is deadpan in tone, satirizes the urge to identify experienced by
those who spend too much time reading Holocaust accounts and narratives. It also
highlights the way identification is not limited to psychological or affective responses.
The body’s instinctive reaction to representations of others’ (painful) experience, which
in Prager’s novel is allegorized as deliberate self-mutilation, is itself a species of
identification that can be considered a useful aid to understanding. Such corporeal
concerns underlie a startling thesis put forward by Alison Landsberg. In the context of
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the need to find new ways of preserving Holocaust memory now that the last survivors
are dying off, Landsberg asks: “is it possible for the Holocaust to become a bodily
memory for those who have not lived through it?” (66) The answer for Landsberg is
yes, by way of “an alternative living memory” she labels “prosthetic”:
Prosthetic memories are memories that circulate publicly, are not organically
based, but are nevertheless experienced with one’s own body – by means of a
wide range of cultural technologies – and as such, become part of one’s personal
archive of experience, informing not only one’s subjectivity, but one’s
relationship to the present and future tenses. I call these memories prosthetic, in
part, because, like an artificial limb, they are actually worn by the body; these
are sensuous memories produced by experience. (66)
Landsberg wants to activate these memories for the public good. She “make[s] the
claim that affective power might be mobilized to have a similar kind of political
potential as conceptual power” (66); that is, she sees a practical utility in the promotion
of certain modes of experience. Museums in which one interacts with exhibits “might
actually install in us [through transference] ‘symptoms’ or prosthetic memories through
which we didn’t actually live, but [with] which we now [. . .] have a kind of experiential
relationship” (82). However, there are problems with this approach. Visiting the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Landsberg reports feelings of physical
distress induced by its experiential element. Then, seeing smoke, she has a sudden
fantasy that she might herself be about to be gassed, leading to a visceral feeling of
helplessness. This moment is argued to be helpful towards gaining understanding of the
Holocaust:
To experience, if only for a flash, the way it feels to have your personhood or
agency stripped away, may be the grounds for understanding or for having
empathy for something totally other and cognitively unimaginable. Perhaps the
experience of vulnerability might itself be a form of knowledge about the
Holocaust. (85)
The first objection to this proposal would be to ask what value there is in a comparison
between a minor moment of fear in a modern democracy and the experience of
persecution, terror and torture at the hands of a genocidal fascist organisation.
Moreover, the smoke seen by Landsberg was not intended as part of the museal
experience, but was in fact a technical fault. It could have happened anywhere, for
example on a subway network, so it is difficult to see what relation it has to the
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Holocaust as such. Though Landsberg describes the experience as one of “empathy”,
its misguided character makes it seem more like an irrational and overdetermined
moment of identification. Indeed, the example is surprising, because Landsberg earlier
gives a usefully nuanced description of what she means by empathy:
While sympathy [. . .] relies upon an essentialism of identification, empathy
recognizes the alterity of identification. Empathy, then, is about the lack of
identity between subjects, about negotiating distances. Empathy [. . .] is not
emotional self-pitying identification with victims, but a way of both feeling for,
while feeling different from, the subject of enquiry. (82)
Landsberg’s definition of empathy, then, closely coincides with my own (and
LaCapra’s) in its emphasis on maintaining the alterity of the other. Yet her examples
suggest that this is unlikely to be achieved through extreme bodily identifications.
Further investigation into the history of meanings of identification may help to explain
why this is so.
LaCapra’s definition of empathy offers a clue to this history. LaCapra has defined
empathy as “a form of virtual, not vicarious, experience related to what Kaja Silverman
has termed heteropathic identification, in which emotional response comes with respect
for the other and the realization that the experience of the other is not one’s own”
(Writing 40). Before exploring LaCapra’s ideas in detail, I wish to follow the
tantalising trail he leaves regarding “heteropathic identification”, which leads back
through Kaja Silverman to the early twentieth century philosopher Max Scheler.
In The Threshold of the Visible World (1996) – the text LaCapra cites – Silverman, a
“psychoanalytic theorist”, is chiefly concerned with how visual artifacts can enable
productive identification with “culturally disprized” (2) others. This aim depends on a
sharp distinction: “It is crucial that this identification conform to an externalizing rather
than internalizing logic – that we identify excorporatively rather than incorporatively,
and, thereby, respect the otherness of the newly illuminated bodies” (2). Silverman
explains that the “incorporative” mode corresponds to what Freud meant by
identification, “the process whereby the other is interiorized as the self” (as in, for
example, melancholia). In “excorporative” identification, in contrast, “the subject
identifies at a distance from his or her proprioceptive self” (23). This argument rests on
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an opposition, taken from the work of Henri Wallon, between the formation of
“exteroceptive” and “proprioceptive” ego-states. Referring to infant psychological
development, exteroceptive corresponds to the visual imago, or Lacan’s “mirror stage”,
which leads to one’s sense of identity. The proprioceptive stage, meanwhile, is a nonvisual, physical sense of one’s “own-ness” that enables one to perceive exteriority. Like
Landsberg, Silverman emphasises an important corporeal element to identification. For
Silverman, the ego and the body are tightly bound together: “The sensational ego is at
the same time psychic and corporeal” (17). As the sensational and proprioceptive ego
are one and the same for Silverman, it follows that it is through the body that she thinks
one can achieve an identification that both preserves the other’s exteriority and enables
us to enter that exteriority. For Silverman, it is “imperative that we learn to idealize
outside the corporeal parameters of the self. [. . .] to do so would be to make possible
our identification at a distance with bodies which we would otherwise phobically avoid”
(37). She gives an example of trying to overcome feelings of disgust for tramps in her
street, acknowledging that there is a strong element of white middle-class guilt
informing her thesis.
Silverman’s central opposition between interior and exterior modes of identification is
theorized through the terms “idiopathic” and “heteropathic”, coined by the early
twentieth-century social philosopher Max Scheler. Silverman first used these terms in
her earlier book Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992), in which idiopathic is broadly
aligned with sadism and heteropathic with masochism. In The Threshold of the Visible
World, as we have seen, Silverman activates the term heteropathic in relation to a
radical and politicized framework of excorporative identification. “Heteropathic
identification” is beginning to look far removed from Landsberg or LaCapra’s
definitions of empathy, and this is not surprising when Scheler’s ideas are examined in
detail.
In The Nature of Sympathy (1923), the text from which Silverman liberally quotes,
Scheler pointedly rejects empathy in the form that he understood it. Defined as
“feeling-into”, Scheler argues that empathy presumes that knowledge of the self
precedes and is more fundamental than knowledge of others. For Scheler, the opposite
is the case: we begin our lives in a universal environment of feelings before
differentiating ourselves and realising our selfhood. Thus we can use our “intuition” to
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go back to this time and draw upon a “universal grammar” (11) of feeling, and so
achieve love for our fellow humans.
Scheler goes on to produce a kind of taxonomy of feelings for others. He makes a
distinction between “vicariously visualised feeling and participation in feeling” (14).
The experience felt in crowds or jolly public houses is a “[m]ere emotional infection”
(12) which has nothing to do with real fellow-feeling; in these situations one is not
sharing others’ joy, but merely cheering oneself up. Included within this category is
“emotional identification”, which is “only a heightened form, a limiting case as it were,
of infection” (18). Here Scheler cites an example, given by Theodor Lipps, of
“aesthetic empathy” in which a spectator becomes at “one with” an acrobat at the circus.
This, though, represents only a partial identification for Scheler, who goes on:
There are other cases, however, [. . .] in which such identification is undoubtedly
complete; which do not merely exemplify a moment of true ‘ecstasy’, but may
be of long duration, and can even become habitual throughout whole phases of
life. They are of two opposite kinds: the idiopathic and the heteropathic. Thus
identification can come about in one way through the total eclipse and
absorption of another self by one’s own, it being thus, as it were, completely
dispossessed and deprived of all rights in its conscious existence and character.
It can also come about the other way, where ‘I’ (the formal subject) am so
overwhelmed and hypnotically bound and fettered by the other ‘I’ (the concrete
individual), that my formal status as a subject is usurped by the other’s
personality, with all its characteristic aspects; in such a case, I live, not in
‘myself’, but entirely in ‘him’, the other person – (in and through him, as it
were). (18-19, emphasis in original)
Heteropathic identification, then, is for Scheler an exotic and extreme psychological
oddity, a mere sub-category of “infection”. The examples he gives are mostly drawn
from ancient times or primitive societies, including the case of religious mystics who
identify with the godhead to the extent that they believe themselves to become that god.
Scheler’s view of empathy, meanwhile, is once again evident when he describes how
this example of the “mysteries of antiquity” continues in a watered-down form as
theatre: “Here, at last, the ecstatic identification is reduced to the level of mere symbolic
empathy” (20, emphasis in original). Such distinctions, when considered alongside
Scheler’s formulations (adopted by Silverman) of being “bound and fettered” and living
“entirely in [. . .] the other person”, suggest that the concept of heteropathic
identification is far removed from the notion of empathy intended by LaCapra. To live
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entirely subsumed within another surely destroys the distance between self and other
that distinguishes his version of empathy from simple identification. However, when
one considers the vexed and confused history of the term empathy, it is perhaps not
surprising that such anomalies should occur.
Empathy is as much bound up with sympathy as with notions of identification. In
modern parlance, empathy is the ability to both understand and share the feelings of
another, while sympathy denotes feelings of pity or sorrow for another’s misfortune.
However, though the word empathy was not coined until 1909, similar ideas circulated
up to two hundred years earlier under the heading of sympathy. As Jonathan Lamb
explains in a recent article, sympathy in eighteenth-century discourse breaks down into
“four degrees of likeness – resemblance, equality, metaphor and identity” (173). In the
first degree, “sympathy is occasioned by physiological similarities close enough for us
to recognize the symptoms of our own emotions in others” (171). In the second, as in
the work of philosopher Francis Hutcheson, this realization of others’ similarity to us
raises moral questions about their rights and “the duties we owe them” (171). The third
is “a more oblique degree of resemblance that is brought home to the heart by means of
imaginative or figurative expressions” (171); such ideas are traced back to Adam
Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). It is the final degree, however, that
prefigures later ideas of empathy; indeed, in order to explain this fourth category, Lamb
reaches for the later term: “And finally there is obliteration of all differences in a
species of empathy that proclaims the identity of the subject and the object” (171). As
Lamb points out, this was the meaning of sympathy for Edmund Burke, who wrote in A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
that “sympathy must be considered as a sort of substitution, by which we are put into
the place of another man” (70).
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, similar ideas were taken up by
aesthetic theorists, but instead of substitution they considered it in terms of projection.
The German term Einfühlung (“feeling-into”) was first used by Robert Vischer in his
doctoral thesis of 1873, and was taken up by fellow philosopher Theodor Lipps. Lipps’
work in turn was evangelized, popularized, and reinterpreted for English readers by the
essayist and novelist Vernon Lee. Though Lee introduced Einfühlung to an Englishspeaking audience, it was in fact the psychologist Edward Titchener who first translated
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it, thus coining the English word “empathy”.7 Indeed, the concept’s cross-fertilization
with the emerging field of psychology is confirmed by Freud’s use of Einfühlung in
“Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious” (1905), in which he “views it as the
process that allows us to understand others by putting ourselves in their place” (Pigman
237). This is consistent with the term’s etymology, as Lee explains in Beauty and
Ugliness (1912):
This word, made up of fühlen, to feel, and ein (herein, hinein), in, into,
conjugated (sich einfühlen) with the pronoun denoting the reflective mode – this
word Einfühlung has existed in German aesthetics ever since Vischer and Lotze
[. . .] Sich einfühlen, to transport oneself into something in feeling [. . .] has in
ordinary German the meaning of putting oneself in the place of some one, of
imagining, of experiencing, the feelings of some one or something. (46, emphasis
in original)
Lee interprets this idea of putting oneself in the place of others in relation to aesthetic
appreciation. Asserting the link between the aesthetic and the beautiful, Lee seeks to
explain why it is the aesthetic and not the artistic sense by which we judge what is
beautiful in art. To do this she posits a process of “aesthetic empathy”, which is the
“projection of our own dynamical and emotional experience into the seen form” (29), or
as Peter Gunn elaborates in his book on Lee, “the projection of our states of
consciousness of our own organism into the object whose perception has aroused those
states of consciousness” (158). This is “analogous to [. . .] moral sympathy” (Lee 20),
as in fellow-feeling for a bereaved neighbour, in that it draws on self-knowledge. In the
case of art, however, the process of aesthetic empathy involves a connection between
the form of the work and our inner impulses. According to this theory, the extent to
which aesthetic empathy results in pleasure or satisfaction is the extent to which the
artwork may be called beautiful.
Although such aesthetic theories have been largely superseded by modernist and
postmodernist thought, ideas of empathy have become highly influential in other fields.
Later in the twentieth century, it became a core concept for Carl Rogers and R. D. Laing
as they developed more open, patient-oriented forms of psychotherapy. It is still the
subject of much psychological and neurological research, especially into its relation to
altruism and “prosocial action” (behaviour that promotes social acceptance and
7
Lee cites Titchener’s Psychology of Thought Processes (MacMillan 1909), p.21.
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friendship).8 Ideas of empathy have also been crucial to a certain strand of social
philosophy. In the early twentieth century, the concept of Verstehen was developed as a
sociological method of understanding which promoted the use of empathy over
objective observation or causal analysis. In Understanding Social Life: The Method
called Verstehen (1975), William Outhwaite explains that this concept was developed in
response to the prevailing intellectual climate of positivism, and also had roots in the
branch of historical inquiry that seeks to understand the actions of people in the past.
Outhwaite cites the historian Johann Gustav Droysen (1838-1908), who “established the
crucial connection between the theory of understanding and the philosophy of history
from which the idea of a verstehende social science eventually grew” (23). Droysen
argued:
The possibility of understanding rests in our familiarity with the expressions
which are present as historical materials. [. . .] An expression projects itself into
the person who perceives it and excites the same inner process. When we hear a
cry of anguish, we experience the anguish of the person who uttered it... (qtd. in
Outhwaite 21)9
Outhwaite is keen to show that reliance on this kind of experience was soon rejected in
the development of the Verstehen concept. He makes a distinction between
“hermeneutic” and “psychological” understanding. While the latter relies on trying
somehow to experience the feelings of another, hermeneutic or interpretative
understanding, for Outhwaite, is based around knowledge of the context surrounding a
human action:
[. . .] when we say we understand someone’s disappointment, anger etc., or his
motives for a certain action, we mean not that we know what it is to feel these
emotions or the force of certain motives [. . .], but rather that we understand the
‘situation’ in which these emotions or intentions ‘make sense’. It is this sort of
understanding, presupposing a certain community of outlook, which I have
called hermeneutic. (15-16)
Outhwaite argues that this distinction is played out in the development of the Verstehen
concept, which he attributes mainly to the German historian and philosopher Wilhelm
Dilthey. Outhwaite says that Dilthey had two phases in his work. Originally, Dilthey
See Suzanne Keen’s survey of recent scientific literature in Empathy and the Novel pp 3-35.
Outhwaite gives the original source as J. G. Droysen, Grundriss der Historik (Halle-Saale, Niemeyer,
1925), para.9.
8
9
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was interested in experiencing others’ “thoughts and emotions from the inside by
“putting oneself in their shoes” (sich hineinversetzen) and reliving their experiences
(nacherleben)” (27). Later in his career, however, Dilthey’s “emphasis shifts from the
empathetic penetration or reconstruction of other people’s mental processes to the
hermeneutic interpretation of cultural products and conceptual structures” (26), thus
apparently rejecting the psychological or “empathetic” aspect of the method.
Yet current definitions of Verstehen continue to emphasize this latter component. For
example, the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy describes Verstehen as follows:
“understanding a human expression is a matter of knowing what in oneself would gain
expression that way, and ‘reliving’ by a process of empathy the mental life of the person
to be understood”. There is also a modern development of Verstehen, “simulation
theory”, defined in the same dictionary as follows: “Understanding others is achieved
when we can ourselves deliberate as they did, and hear their words as if they are our
own”. Given this continuation of the empathic aspect in Verstehen and its derivatives,
Outhwaite’s determined emphasis on interpretative and contextual elements is perhaps
best seen in terms of the tendency to conflate empathy with the problematic
pathological category of identification. As shown above in the work of Robert
Eaglestone, the term identification can be used pejoratively to signify the delusional or
morally dubious nature of claims to really feel as others feel. Outhwaite, arguing for the
relevance of Verstehen to contemporary sociology, is understandably reluctant to
associate it with such discourse. Nevertheless, the problem remains, and attempts to
evoke empathy, whether by sociologists, novelists, or historians, are inevitable, and as
such should perhaps be considered in terms of their potential value rather than
proscription. I would suggest that this can only be achieved through a nuanced
definition of empathy, in which its distinction from identification or sympathy is
highlighted by emphasising the crucial component of understanding alongside affect.
In Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (2005), E.
Ann Kaplan alludes to this problem in her criticism of the typical response to television
news reports of atrocities in places like Rwanda and Iraq. She labels the viewers’
attitude “empty empathy”, or “empathy elicited by images of suffering provided without
any context or background knowledge” (93). Context, knowledge, understanding,
comprehension – all these terms suggest the importance of hermeneutical philosophy to
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the problem of empathy. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s application of hermeneutics to the
philosophy of historical understanding may therefore be a productive area to explore.
Unlike Droysen’s rather simplistic view that when reading historical accounts one can
directly experience another’s “anguish”, Gadamer offers a nuanced account of our
relationship with the past, arguing that understanding can only be achieved through
what he calls a “fusion of horizons”.
In Wahrheit und Methode (1960; translated in 1975 as Truth and Method), Gadamer
insists that we can only understand the past in the light of the present, and only
understand the present in the light of the past. “There is no more an isolated horizon of
the present in itself that there are historical horizons which have to be acquired. Rather,
understanding is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves”
(306, emphasis in original). We arise from history, which shapes both the way we are
now and the way we address the past. As this is inescapable, awareness of it is
desirable; Gadamer calls this awareness Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein
(historically effected consciousness). We are “always already affected by history”
(300). Historically effected consciousness is the awareness of the hermeneutical
“situation”, from which we can never escape or step outside. Situations necessarily
limit our horizons, which are finite, but can nevertheless be expanded. Historical
understanding sometimes claims to “see the past in its own terms, not in terms of our
contemporary criteria and prejudices but within its own historical horizon” (302-3). But
this is not a “true conversation” (303); it is one-sided, as in a meeting between doctor
and patient. If we deny our own perspective “we have given up the claim to find in the
past any truth that is valid and intelligible for ourselves” (303). Gadamer’s “horizons”,
then, are my knowledge and the knowledge presented to me in, say, a historical text. To
achieve understanding I must expand my horizon beyond my limited purview, yet
without leaving it behind. The space of this expansion is the universal, that which is
beyond both my horizon and the horizon of the historical text and which includes them
both. Within this space, the horizons are constantly shifting, expanding and contracting.
Gadamer’s account, then, moves us away from the presumption that it is only through
identification that one can understand the other. Instead he talks of “transposing
ourselves” within an overall framework of horizons: “Transposing ourselves consists
neither in the empathy of one individual for another nor in subordinating another person
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to our own standards; rather, it always involves rising to a higher universality that
overcomes not only our own particularity but also that of the other” (305). It is this
space, where self and other may be apprehended as it were from a third vantage point,
that I want to invoke in order to enable a new, more expansive definition of empathy.
Though Gadamer, in the quotation above, seems to take a narrow view of empathy,
rejecting it in favour of “transposition”, I contend that his concept of the “fusion of
horizons” may help enable an empathic space in which proximity and distance,
identification and objectivity, can co-exist simultaneously without prejudice to each
other.
This balance is what LaCapra seems to demand of empathy. LaCapra’s ideas on this
subject have developed through his books Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory,
Trauma (1994), History and Memory after Auschwitz (1998), Writing History, Writing
Trauma (2001) and History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (2004).
Like Gadamer, LaCapra takes a meta-historical approach that emphasizes “one’s own
implication in the problems one treats” (History and Memory 8). However, for LaCapra
this is figured through a psychoanalytic framework. He urges an approach to
historiography which acknowledges “the implication of the observer in the observed,
what in psychoanalytic terms is treated as transference” (Writing 36). LaCapra’s use of
psychoanalytic terms is rather different from that of, say, Kaja Silverman. His approach
“selectively appropriates aspects of the work of Freud and of those responding to him in
ways I judge to be fruitful for reconfiguring historical understanding as a process that
requires a critical exchange with the past bearing on the present and future” (History
and Memory 6). The key terms he lifts from Freud are “acting-out” and “workingthrough”, which, broadly aligned with “melancholia” and “mourning”, he sees not
oppositionally but as two sides of the same coin. Working-through will often
necessarily contain vestiges of acting-out; both are forms of repetition, but while the
former remains fixated on the past, the latter concentrates on the present and future.
Thus LaCapra focuses on ethico-political concerns such as justice, vengeance, mourning
the dead, and the possible liability of perpetrators’ descendants. He even hopes that his
work will enable “the elaboration of more desirable social and political institutions and
practices” (Writing 85). For LaCapra, it is not enough to passively remember; ethicallyfocused action is needed. Memory in his writing is thus a transitive concept, and a key
component of working-through. LaCapra’s work implicitly rejects any opposition
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between memory and history, instead asserting that the work of historians, and others
who write about the past, must always include aspects of memory.
Memory implies affect and subjectivity, and it is in this area that LaCapra’s notion of
empathy makes its appearance. LaCapra argues that it is mistaken for historians to
reject affectivity in favour of a wholly objective approach. Like Gadamer, he knows
this to be self-deluding. The question is how best to activate one’s emotional response
in the service of useful understanding:
Empathy [. . .] involves affectivity as a crucial aspect of understanding in the
historian or other observer or analyst. As in trauma, numbing (objectification
and splitting of object from subject, including self-as-subject from self-asobject) may function for the historian as a protective shield or preservative
against unproblematic identification with the experience of others and the
possibility of being traumatized by it. But objectivity should not be identified
with objectivism or exclusive objectification that denies or forecloses empathy,
just as empathy should not be conflated with unchecked identification, vicarious
experience, and surrogate victimage. Objectivity requires checks and resistances
to full identification, and this is one important function of meticulous research,
contextualization, and the attempt to be as attentive as possible to the voices of
others whose alterity is recognised. Empathy in this sense is a form of virtual,
not vicarious, experience [. . .] in which emotional response comes with respect
for the other and the realization that the experience of the other is not one’s own.
(Writing 40)
LaCapra’s analysis of the problem of objectivity echoes Edith Wyschogrod’s notion of
the “heterological historian” in her book An Ethics of Remembering (1998): “The
heterological historian is driven, on the one hand, by an impassioned necrophilia which
would bring to life the dead others for whom she speaks. On the other hand, as
“objective”, she consciously or otherwise assume responsibility for a dispassionate
relation to events” (3).
But LaCapra goes further by defining this problem in terms of empathy. He separates
empathy from similar concepts, carefully distancing himself from the problems of
identification:
Empathy, as I have construed the term, is to be disengaged from its traditional
insertion in a binary logic of identity and difference. In terms of this
questionable logic, empathy is mistakenly conflated with identification or fusion
with the other; it is opposed to sympathy implying difference from the discrete
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other who is the object of pity, charity, or condescension. In contradistinction to
this entire frame of reference, empathy should rather be understood in terms of
an affective relation, rapport, or bond with the other recognized and respected as
other. (Writing 212-3)
Empathy is to be activated through a process of “empathic unsettlement”, which is “a
kind of virtual experience through which one puts oneself in the other’s position while
recognizing the difference of that position and hence not taking the other’s place”
(Writing 78). Its goal is “better self-understanding and [. . .] a sensitivity or openness to
responses that generate[s] necessary tensions in one’s account” (Writing 105).
These definitions show that LaCaprian empathy is essentially self-reflexive. In his later
book History in Transit, LaCapra moves on from describing the desired position of the
writer to closer attention to the text or artifact, in which again the most valued quality is
self-reflexivity. He develops the concept of “situational transcendence”, an approach to
events like the Holocaust that is inherently self-questioning and not caught up with the
“symptomatic”. LaCapra argues that symptomatic artifacts, such as racist tracts, contain
nothing that invites critique or debate.
By contrast, more critical and self-critical artifacts or phenomena signal or even
foreground (however subtly) their own symptomatic dimensions and engage
processes that offer perspective on these dimensions and may provide the
wherewithal for their critique, at times indicating transformative possibilities.
The latter possibilities could be termed situationally transcendent in that they
work (or play) with and through problems (including those transmitted from the
past) and do not leap beyond them in some unmediated rupture. (History in
Transit 10)
Though mostly concerned with historiography and critical theory, LaCapra
acknowledges that literature too may contain these elements of empathic self-reflexivity
and thereby contribute to our understanding of the past. Though, like Eaglestone, he
rejects fiction about Holocaust perpetrators on the grounds that it may lead to “a
confused sense of identification with or involvement in certain figures and their beliefs
or actions in a manner that may well subvert judgment” (Writing 203), he also argues
that the relative freedom of art and literature to experiment may be productive: “The
problem that clearly deserves further reflection is the nature of actual and desirable
responses in different genres, practices, and disciplines, including the status of mixed or
hybridized genres and the possibility of playing different roles or exploring different
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approaches in a given text” (Writing 110). I argue that the works of writers like Sebald
and Foer constitute precisely “mixed or hybridized genres” in that they combine fiction,
(auto-)biography and history, and, moreover, that they include the element of selfreflexivity which as we have seen is crucial to a productive notion of empathy. In
particular, the texts I analyse in later chapters foreground their engagement with the
problems of how to approach the past by inserting a version of themselves into their
narratives in the form of a persona (“playing different roles”). These personae are in a
sense a manifestation in fiction of Gadamer’s “historically effected consciousness” in
that they foreground the importance of the observer in the observed, the perspective of
the present on the past. As later chapters will show, the insertion of ambiguous
personae between author and subject helps enable an approach to the past in which
proximity (subjectivity, identification) and distance (objectivity, critical understanding)
occur simultaneously in a complex gesture of empathy.
Because this gesture is achieved through narrative forms, the term “narrative empathy”
suggests itself. However, this is both insufficient and potentially misleading. Indeed,
the phrase has been used recently to describe a quite different phenomenon: the link
between empathy and altruism in relation to reading. In Empathy and the Novel (2007),
Suzanne Keen asks whether the act of reading fiction boosts our empathic response and
leads to prosocial, altruistic actions in the real world. Though Keen is sceptical about
such claims, they generate an interesting enquiry into what happens when we read, and
the relationships between reader, author and text. For Keen, the theory of affect, as in,
for example, readers’ identification with characters, is a neglected area of enquiry
(though she cites a growing body of work in the area of “cognitive literary studies”).
Keen is interested in the unsophisticated responses of “ordinary readers”, whose
perspective she regards as too often ignored. This may underlie her conception of
empathy as an almost involuntary phenomenon: “Throughout this book I distinguish the
spontaneous, responsive sharing of an appropriate feeling as empathy, and the more
complex, differentiated feeling for another as sympathy (sometimes called empathic
concern in psychological literature” (4). This is very different from the idea of empathy
developed in the hermeneutical and historical tradition, which I am adopting, in which
empathy is distinguished from identification precisely through its complex mingling of
cognitive understanding with shared feeling. In this frame of reference, the
“spontaneous, responsive sharing of an appropriate feeling” would be more likely to be
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considered simply as identification, while sympathy would be regarded as more
straightforward than empathy.
The difference in approach to the topic of empathy in literature between Keen’s thesis
and the present study is also highlighted by her interpretation of psychology and
neurology. Drawing on scientific research, Keen notes that empathy is commonly
considered a culturally prized trait. She cites the work of Martin Hoffman, who argues
that through education, empathy can become prosocial and altruistic. However, others
contend that empathy can just as easily lead to bad outcomes, immoral actions, or even
the impediment of justice by obscuring the common good. Keen also cites research
suggesting that factors other than reading are more important for enabling prosocial
actions or for the creation of an altruistic personality, including education, religion,
politics, upbringing, environment, and especially the social attitude of egalitarianism.
This would seem to marginalize her project of investigating the impact of empathic
novel-reading. Nevertheless, Keen proposes to analyse what she calls “[t]he position of
the reader with respect to the author’s strategic empathizing in fictional world-making”
(xiv). She identifies three levels of narrative empathy, “bounded”, “ambassadorial” and
“broadcast”, which correspond to feelings for the “in-group”, “chosen others” and
“every reader” respectively (xiv).
This theory of narrative empathy differs from my thesis in many respects, of which two
are particularly important. First, it concentrates more on the role of the reader than of
the writer. Second, it leaves out the dimensions of time and memory. Novels like
Sebald’s Austerlitz and Foer’s Everything is Illuminated are overtly concerned with the
nature and consequences of memory, and the relationship between the author in the
present and the subject in the past. They reflect a wider concern in contemporary
society with memory and memorialisation, an obvious example being the proliferation
of Holocaust monuments and memorials. They also reflect critical discourses such as
trauma theory, with its emphasis on the belated effects of the past in the present, and
memory studies, with its interest in explaining how people “remember” events of
previous generations.
It is in these areas that the term “transgenerational” has begun to make an appearance.
For example, in a list of key questions raised by the work of Sebald, Long and
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Whitehead ask: “Is the transgenerational transmission of trauma an appropriate model
for describing the impact of the war on those who came after?” (9) Such ideas of
memory “transmission” can be traced back to the concept of “transgenerational
haunting” proposed in the 1970s by psychologists Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok
to describe the way unspeakable family dramas may be passed down through
generations. Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word (1976) has been
extensively explicated by Esther Rashkin in Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of
Narrative (1992). Rashkin begins by explaining Abraham and Torok’s theory of
“transgenerational haunting” by “phantoms”. A phantom is a psychic phenomenon that
arises when an unspeakable family drama (what Rashkin calls a secret) is silently
transmitted from one generation to the next. This is explained by way of a “dual unity”
theory of child development, in which children receive their family history during the
weaning process. If at this crucial period there is a “gap or lacuna in the parent’s
speech”, then this “unspeakable secret suspended within the adult is transmitted silently
to the child in ‘undigested’ form and lodges within his or her mental topography as an
unmarked tomb of inaccessible knowledge” (Rashkin 27-8). Thus transgenerational
haunting is offered as an explanation for traumatic symptoms in later life.
Other uses of “transgenerational” include Andreas Huyssen’s description of Sebald as
embodying “transgenerational traumatization absent the experience itself” (149), and a
recent book by psychiatrists on the effects of the Holocaust on the descendants of
survivors, The Third Reich in the Unconscious: Transgenerational Transmission and its
Consequences (Volkan et al., 2002). The term “transgenerational”, absent from all
dictionaries, seems then to denote a mysterious process by which events (especially
traumatic ones) from the recent past come to effect later generations. Thus it partakes
of “memory” in its more expansive sense of that which we actively choose to remember
that is nevertheless not part of our personal memory-store. As such it is related to
Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory”, which is “distinguished from memory by
generational distance and from history by deep personal connection” and which
“characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that
preceded their birth” (22). I deal with this idea in detail in Chapter 5 of the present
study. For now, it is these dimensions of time and memory that I wish to add to the
concept of empathy in order to begin to describe the approach to the Holocaust taken by
certain recent authors. The Latin prefix trans- is defined in the OED as “across, to or on
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the further side of, beyond, over”, and as later chapters will show there is a strong sense
in Sebald and Foer’s work of a desire to move beyond immediate experience and
journey to the further side of the past, whether through travel to historical sites,
genealogical reconstruction, or (imagined) contact with survivors from that past.
This chapter has attempted to show that the ethical and epistemological problems of
identification may be resolved to an extent by drawing on a nuanced definition of
empathy, which emphasizes the latter term’s simultaneous combination of affect and
objectivity, and its dual meaning of sharing the feelings of others while at the same time
understanding or comprehending the situation and context. Rather than a species of
identification, as suggested in approaches ranging from Scheler’s taxonomy of feeling
to Keen’s theory of the novel, empathy in LaCaprian terms is a distinct concept.
Versions of empathy have been useful in the development of aesthetic theory,
sociology, and psychology, but it is its links with historical and hermeneutic
understanding which have proved more relevant to my study of authors who write about
the past. Meanwhile, by adding “transgenerational” to empathy I wish to emphasize the
importance of ideas of time, memory and generational distance. Through
transgenerational empathy the horrors of the Holocaust may be approached in a way
that neither over-identifies with nor objectifies its victims, but instead, to use Gadamer’s
terms, enacts a self-reflexive “historically effected consciousness” that may enable a
productive “fusion of horizons” between the writer and the traumatic past. Though
Gadamer did not consider this empathic as such, I contend that this wider space of
hermeneutical understanding is an ideal vicinity in which to contain LaCaprian
empathy, which posits the possibility that the other may be approached with affect
while nevertheless maintaining one’s distance. Later chapters on Sebald and Foer will
seek to clarify how this “transgenerational empathy” manifests itself in narrative. First,
however, I turn to two contemporary Holocaust narratives which fail to achieve
empathy and remain fixed in an attitude of identification through their favouring of
memory over history.
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Chapter 3
The consequences of promoting memory over history: identification and deception
in Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces and Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments
“History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral: what we consciously
remember is what our conscience remembers” (Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
138).
“The document I hold in my hands [. . .] gives the date of my birth as February
12, 1941. But this date has nothing to do with either the history of this century
or my personal history” (Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments 154).
Two apparently very different contributions to Holocaust literature appeared in 1996: a
densely poetic novel about the legacy of the Shoah, Fugitive Pieces; and the English
translation of a sensational memoir by a child survivor, Fragments: Memories of a
Childhood, 1939-1948. The former is the first work of fiction by Anne Michaels, a
Canadian previously known as a poet. The authorship of the latter, originally published
in German as Bruchstücke: Aus einer Kindheit 1939-1948 (1995), is famously less
straightforward. The name on the title page, Binjamin Wilkomirski, was later
conclusively proved to be the pseudonym of Bruno Dössekker. Dössekker had not lived
through two Nazi concentration camps as he claimed, and a literary fraud was exposed
(see Ganzfried 1998, Lappin 1999, Gourevitch 1999, and Maechler 2001). Though very
different in form and provenance, then, Fugitive Pieces and Fragments nevertheless
share, on both textual and meta-textual levels, one over-arching theme: memory. In this
chapter, I argue that the attitude of both authors towards the Holocaust is defined by
their favouring of “memory” over “history”. Though they carried out extensive
historical research, both profess a disdain for history as such in favour of what they
perceive to be the healing and redemptive power of memory. Reflecting wider trends,
both Michaels and Wilkomirski place memory above history, belief above evidence,
affect above cognition, feeling above knowledge. Memory is so important in their
value-systems that it becomes acceptable to them to appropriate the memories or
subject-position of others, so long as beneficial effects appear to accrue, whether to the
individual (Wilkomirski) or to society as a whole (Michaels).
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This process may be characterized as a species of identification. Wilkomirski identified
with Holocaust survivors to the extent that he came to believe he was one himself.
Michaels’ narrators appear to equate the status of those born after with eye-witnesses to
the event – a highly dubious identification. Fugitive Pieces also portrays the
redemptive path of its characters’ lives as being directly correlated with the extent to
which they identify with victims. Thus I will endeavour to show that the position of
these authors in relation to the past is essentially identificatory rather than empathic.
Not only is their emphasis on memory a problematic mode of identification, but they
may also be seen to over-identify with memory itself. By privileging memory and
affect they take a position of over-proximity, deliberately precluding the distance that
other authors, for ethical and epistemological reasons, build into their narrative
structures. Michaels and Wilkomirski polemically oppose memory to history, in which
the one stands for identification, affect, and proximity, while the other is thought to
equal objectivity, rationality, and distance. As suggested in the last chapter, it is rather
in the combination of these attributes that LaCaprian empathy may be achieved. It may
thus follow that oppositions between memory and history are false or unhelpful, and
that textual practice should seek a balance between the two. Indeed, it is precisely this
balance that forms the core of certain works by W. G. Sebald and Jonathan Safran Foer
which are analysed in later chapters of the present study.
It may be helpful first to put the memory-history opposition into context. An initial
observation is that the argument, at least within the academic world, appears to take
place within the field or discipline of “History”. The conflict is not between memory
and history as such, but between a historiographical practice that welcomes and
embraces memory and one that treats it with suspicion. In 1992, the Harvard historian
Charles Maier, at a conference entitled “The Future of Memory”, treated this issue as
one of some importance. Is there, Maier asks, “A Surfeit of Memory?” Despite careful
equivocation, his answer is ultimately damning. For Maier, the “memory industry” is
characterized by “complacency” and “collective self-indulgence”. The contemporary
emphasis on memory is “inauthentic and unhealthy,” “neurasthenic and disabling,” a
“semi-opaque and self-referential activity” which signifies a “retreat from
transformative politics”. History, on the other hand, offers a wider perspective, ensures
proper “causal sequencing,” and takes seriously the responsibility to “explain” the past
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(137, 141, 143, 150). Maier’s speech was delivered at the tenth anniversary conference
of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. Though
careful to praise this venture in his opening remarks, Maier’s argument nevertheless
reveals the fear and suspicion felt by historians in the face of the emergence of such
projects which place memory at their centre.
Maier’s speech took place in the same year as the appearance of the seventh and final
volume of Pierre Nora’s vast project of French cultural memory, Les Lieux de Mémoire
(1984-92). This venture dissected the cultural consciousness of France through its
monuments, rituals, legends and artifacts. As general editor, Nora used the project to
express a startling thesis, in which he laments the loss of an organic mode of memory to
the forces of modern historical consciousness. For Nora, this amounts to nothing less
than a “conquest and eradication of memory by history” (8).10 Whereas memory used
to be social and “immediate,” it has now become individual and “indirect”. “True
memory” consists of “gestures and habits, in skills passed down by unspoken traditions,
in the body’s inherent self-knowledge, in unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories,”
whereas “memory transformed by its passage through history” is “voluntary and
deliberate, experienced as a duty, no longer spontaneous” (13). (There are echoes here
of Walter Benjamin’s thesis that the death of storytelling is “a concomitant symptom of
the secular productive forces of history” [86].) As a result, for Nora, memory’s
manifestations in the world have also changed. “There are lieux de mémoire, sites of
memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of
memory” (7).
Nora’s argument expresses an almost mystical nostalgia. Lawrence Kritzman, in his
foreword to the English translation, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French
Past, observes that “Nora’s magnum opus represents the symptomology of a certain
form of cultural melancholia” (ix). That this nostalgic melancholia is expressed in
terms of an opposition between memory and history, which is nevertheless enacted
within a historiographical project, reveals the importance that memory as a concept had
gained by this time. The influence of Halbwachs’ theory of collective memory is
clearly visible and often noted. Just as important to the rise of memory, however,
Page numbers are from Nora’s 1989 article in Representations, which is substantively the same as his
general introduction to Les Lieux de Mémoire.
10
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particularly in relation to Holocaust studies, is the Jewish memorial tradition. This
strand reveals the sacred aspect to certain views of collective memory that is implicit in
Nora’s work. Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982)
makes this feature explicit while expressing strikingly similar sentiments to the French
historian. Yerushalmi draws on a specifically Jewish notion of memory as active,
ritualistic, redemptive, and hopeful, and invokes the traditions of rabbinical
ahistoricism, Kabbalah, and Gnostic myth. Despite the survival of these traditions in
Jewish consciousness, he argues, collective Jewish memory has been “eroded” (127).
This is a “malady” that cannot be “healed” by historians (94). Like Nora, Yerushalmi
distinguishes memory from modern historiography, arguing that the former is selective
and the latter all-encompassing. This totalizing tendency of history is criticized for
challenging and reversing the process of collective memory. Modern historical
consciousness is no substitute for the certainties of the past: “Nothing has replaced the
coherence and meaning with which a powerful messianic faith once imbued both Jewish
past and future. Perhaps nothing else can” (95).
Accusations of history’s totalising propensities go hand in hand with the rise of
memory, and can be traced back much further than Yerushalmi. In “The Burden of
History” (1966), Hayden White argued that historians must draw on innovations in both
the artistic and scientific spheres in order to “recognize that there is no such thing as a
single correct view of any object under study but that there are many correct views”.
Working within this new, pluralist approach, historians “should no longer naively
expect that statements about a given epoch or complex of events in the past
‘correspond’ to some pre-existent body of ‘raw facts’” (47). Such arguments have
paved the way for the voices of apparently insignificant individuals to be included in
accounts of the past. Their memories are no longer discounted because of their lack of
correspondence to “established” facts, but instead are embraced, either for generating
new ideas and perspectives, or for expressing the formerly silenced voices of the
oppressed.
This vein of thought has been nourished by Michel Foucault’s project of re-examining
history from the perspective of its participants and revealing the power structures
ignored by previous assumptions. In 1990, George Lipsitz adapted Foucault’s term
counter-memory to promote the pluralistic and subjective qualities of memory over
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totalising historical accounts. Counter-memory for Lipsitz is an ethical act of criticism.
It is
a way of remembering and forgetting that starts with the local, the immediate,
and the personal. Unlike historical narratives that begin with the totality of
human existence and then locate specific actions and events within that totality,
counter-memory starts with the particular and the specific and then builds
outward toward a total story. (213)
In itself this method appears unobjectionable. But Lipsitz uses it to make a claim about
different kinds of “truth”. He examines five “popular” novels about marginalized
peoples, which are held to exemplify the heterogeneous plurality of experience and
thereby challenge the oppressions of history. However, they also tap into the collective
memory of their readership, which is conceived to be from the same ethnic or social
group as the writer. This collective memory, for Lipsitz, is the only relevant test:
If counter-memory lacks the traditional truth tests of evidence basic to linear
histories, it also subjects itself to an even more rigorous test – the standard of
collective memory and desire. For these narratives to succeed, they must
resonate with the experiences and feelings of their audiences. (228)
This impulse to replace “truth tests of evidence” with “the standard of collective
memory and desire” is precisely what Charles Maier feared about the prevailing
intellectual climate. Meanwhile, the quasi-mystical, perhaps even sacral, tendencies of
Lipsitz’s argument are revealed by his appeal (and here he self-avowedly departs from
Foucault) to a new (or perhaps old) kind of totality:
It is in looking at the great cycle that binds us all that counter-memory surpasses
history and myth, that it transcends the false closures of linear history and the
destructive ruptures and divisions of myth to create an active memory which
draws upon the pluralities of the past and present to illumine the opportunities of
the future. (226, emphasis mine)
Thus once again the appeal to memory includes nostalgia for an organic or “natural”
apprehension of the world that has been somehow obscured by contemporary life and
thought. Nora’s “unspoken traditions,” Yerushalmi’s “coherence and meaning” through
faith, and Lipsitz’s “great cycle” are all strangely vague formulations that announce
their authors’ wish to stand outside empirical evidence or objective rationality.
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In a wide-ranging article on the rise of memory studies published in 2000, Kerwin Lee
Klein criticizes this tendency. Klein points out that supposedly postmodern ideas about
memory, as found in our “new memorial consciousness” (129), are essentially the same
as those of the pre-modern era, but differently clothed. For Klein, this is revealed by the
religious and spiritual connotations found in the language of memory studies: testimony,
redemption, ritual, witnessing, mourning and so on. Thus, “the new memory work
displaces the old hermeneutics of suspicion with a therapeutic discourse whose quasireligious gestures link it with memory’s deep semantic past” (141-2). This atavistic
impulse appears almost everywhere in recent writing about memory. Andreas
Huyssen’s Twilight Memories (1995) is a case in point. The cultural historian makes an
important point about the generative power of memory, arguing that its basic structural
“fissure” between experience and representation underlies “cultural and artistic
creativity” (2-3). Further, he very reasonably argues that “the shift from history to
memory represents a welcome critique of compromised teleological notions of history
rather than being simply anti-historical, relativistic, or subjective” (6). But in locating
the memory boom as a reaction against late capitalism and the information revolution,
Huyssen implies that there was once a golden age when time was experienced more
naturally. For Huyssen, attention to memory
represents the attempt to slow down information processing, to resist the
dissolution of time in the synchronicity of the archive, to recover a mode of
contemplation outside the universe of simulation and fast-speed information and
cable networks, to claim some anchoring space in a world of puzzling and often
threatening heterogeneity, non-synchronicity, and information overload. (7)
Huyssen thus links the rise of memory with a concurrent rejection of modern life. In
this argument, memory is the shield with which we are to defend ourselves against the
inhuman advances of (post)modernity. This suggests that memory is somehow what
makes us human; and it is only a short leap from this to say that memory is identity.
Indeed, work in cultural memory tends to proceed from this assumption. For example,
Marita Sturken begins her book on American cultural memory of AIDS and Vietnam,
Tangled Memories (1997), with this bald assertion: “As the means by which we
remember who we are, memory provides the very core of identity” (1). But memory is
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fallible and vulnerable. Each time we remember something, we re-member it; that is,
we inevitably modify the memory by the act of remembrance. Memories do not live in
a filing cabinet of the mind, waiting to be retrieved in their original state. As Linda
Grant writes, paraphrasing neurobiologist Steven Rose, memory “isn’t a place, a storehouse or a machine for recording events” but “an intricate and ever shifting net of firing
neurons [. . .] the twistings and turnings of which rearrange themselves completely each
time something is recalled” (qtd. in King, Memory 15). As I argued in Chapter 1 of the
present study, this also goes for so-called traumatic memories. So to the extent that we
“are” our memories, humans are uncertain, changeable, and paradoxical. We would get
nothing done if we only relied on what our memories tell us. Instead we combine the
faculty with attempts at objective, rational, empirical testing, one manifestation of
which is the impulse to write history. This combination may be compared to the dual
structure of empathy, defined in this study as a simultaneous gesture of proximity and
distance. Indeed, LaCapra’s idea of “empathic unsettlement” stems precisely from his
historian’s desire for objective truth combined with unease about the affective power of
memory, which he nevertheless seeks to acknowledge and harness.
LaCapra’s thesis, then, arises from the crucial importance placed on the opposition
between memory and history. As in the views of Charles Maier quoted above, this
arises in turn from a suspicion of new methods which bypass empirical truth-testing. As
Roth and Salas summarize in their introduction to Disturbing Remains: Memory,
History and Crisis in the Twentieth Century (2001): “Appeals to memory are not subject
to the same criteria of adjudication as appeals to historical evidence. They claim an
unmediated authenticity not subject to academic critique” (3). In the field of Holocaust
studies, this has led to a sometimes polarized argument about the relative merits of
documentary and testimonial evidence. Raul Hilberg, for example, compiled his
landmark work The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) almost entirely from
statistics and documents, largely ignoring survivor accounts. One problem with this
approach is that it necessarily draws on the accounts of perpetrators, as it is they who
wrote the memoranda, timetables and reports on which Hilberg draws, rather than those
of victims, whose voices may consequently go unheard. In his memoir The Politics of
Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (1996), Hilberg defends his position by
citing three problems with survivor accounts. First, survivors are in no way
representative of victims as a whole; they cannot be described as a “random sample”
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(133) when the majority of the cohort are dead. Second, interest in survivor accounts
has tended to exalt victims and portray them as heroic whatever their actual actions.
Most importantly, however, survivor accounts omit details the historian needs:
In their accounts, survivors generally leave out the setting of their experiences,
such as specific localities or the names and positions of persons they
encountered. Even when they talk about themselves, they do not necessarily
reveal mundane information [. . .]. Understandably the survivors seldom speak
of those experiences that were most humiliating or embarrassing [. . .]. Only
one fact is always revealed clearly and completely. It is the self-portrait of the
survivors, their psychological makeup, and what it took to survive. (133)
This account of the survivor memory indicates its tendency towards selectivity and
subjectivity. Hilberg prefers to focus on documents, for which he displays all the
reverence of a life-long archival researcher. However, despite Hilberg’s influence in the
field, the extent to which his approach has led to a lack of attention to survivor memory
is negligible. In the last few decades there has been a plethora of first-person
testimonial accounts published as books; new museal approaches that privilege
individual voices, such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington D.C.; television, film and novel treatments that focus on (often heroic)
individuals; and vast video projects like the Fortunoff Archive and Steven Spielberg’s
Shoah Foundation which seek to record the memories of as many Holocaust survivors
as possible. Hilberg was perhaps fighting a losing battle in his plea for attention to facts
and documentary evidence in the face of the memory boom.
It was in this climate that Binjamin Wilkomirski’s memoir appeared, first in Germany
in 1995, and then in translation the following year as Fragments. In many ways this
text exemplifies the turn from objective history to affective memory in the latter stages
of the twentieth century, as the following analysis will show. Now that the events of the
“Wilkomirski Affair” are several years past, it is perhaps possible to gain some
perspective on them; to evaluate the critical response, which appears to have peaked;
and to move away from the critical fixation on what the case “reveals” and return to the
original text as an object of analysis.
The facts were exhaustively researched and presented by Stefan Maechler in his report
The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth (2001), and I rely on this work in
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what follows.11 The story put forward by the author of Fragments is that he was born
Binjamin Wilkomirski in the late 1930s in Eastern Europe; escaped from Riga when the
Nazis arrived, possibly witnessing the death of his father; endured a series of horrors in
the camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz; lived after the war in a Krakow orphanage
before being smuggled to Switzerland and another children’s home; and finally was
adopted by an affluent Zurich couple named Dössekker and given a new identity.
However, Maechler has proved beyond reasonable doubt that the author of Fragments
was in fact born Bruno Grosjean in Switzerland in 1941 to an unmarried mother of low
social status; was given up for adoption after two years; had three sets of foster-parents
before eventually settling with the Dössekkers, whose name he took; and from a young
age demonstrated both a tendency towards self-invention and an obsession with the
Holocaust. Indeed, Maechler persuasively argues that Bruno Dössekker’s creation of
the identity of a Jewish Holocaust survivor named “Binjamin Wilkomirski” took place
gradually over many years before culminating with the publication of his book in 1995,
and that the case is as much one of pathological identity confusion as deliberate fraud.
In both versions of events, the boy grows up to be Bruno Dössekker, a successful
musician and instrument builder in Switzerland. The contradictions between the
“memories” set out in Fragments and the author’s public identity were highlighted in a
letter from a local journalist to the publisher, Suhrkamp, while the manuscript was still
being processed. As a result, Dössekker was prevailed upon by Suhrkamp to add an
Afterword which acknowledges the discrepancy, and in which he advances the claim
that his birth certificate is both incomplete and false. Indeed, the author of Fragments
states that he has “taken legal steps to have this imposed identity annulled” (154),
though in fact there was nothing wrong with the certificate and Dössekker’s “legal
steps” were never taken. On publication the book received critical acclaim, though
commercial sales were relatively small. Translated into nine languages, its author
received the National Jewish Book Award (1996), the Prix Mémoire de la Shoah by the
Fondation du Judaïsme Français, and Jewish Quarterly’s prize for non-fiction (both
1997). Blake Eskin, in The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski (2002),
reports that while many Holocaust experts praised the book, there were dissenting
voices from such notables as Raul Hilberg and Lawrence Langer, who unfortunately did
Maechler’s report was “[o]riginally published in somewhat different form in Switzerland in the German
language as Der Fall Wilkomirski”, in 2000, according to the copyright page in my edition.
11
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not put them into print. Instead, the first published doubts about the veracity of
Fragments appeared in a review on the Amazon website in March 1998 by Michael
Mills, an amateur historian known for his revisionist sympathies (Eskin 76). However,
it was the Swiss journalist Daniel Ganzfried who officially broke the story, aggressively
challenging the author of Fragments in a series of articles for the Zurich weekly Die
Weltwoche, the first of which appeared in August 1998. Ganzfried had previously
published his own Holocaust book, Der Absender (1995), a novel in which he openly
fictionalized the story of his survivor father; perhaps this made him alert to the issues of
truth and memory suggested by Fragments. Then in 1999, two investigative journalists
interviewed Dössekker and presented further evidence of the deception. The titles of
Elena Lappin and Philip Gourevitch’s articles – “A Man with Two Heads” and “The
Memory Thief” – neatly summarize the twin approaches of amateur psychoanalysis and
moral accusation that the case provoked. These interventions forced Dössekker’s
literary agent into action. It engaged Maechler, a Swiss historian, whose findings
persuaded publishers worldwide to belatedly withdraw the book from their lists. This
has resulted in the curious situation that the text of Fragments is now only available as
an appendix to Maechler’s report or through second-hand sources.
The 1997 Picador edition of Fragments carries, on its back cover, some quotations from
the reviews. The first, attributed to Paul Bailey in the Daily Telegraph, concludes: “The
bravery of [Wilkomirski’s] undertaking cannot be exaggerated, nor the sense of human
dignity it leaves with the reader.” The second, quoting Patricia Lee in the Literary
Review, calls Fragments “[a]n unforgettable tribute on many levels [. . .] [which]
implicitly [. . .] honours the personal qualities of the writer”. By virtue of such
“bravery” and other “human qualities”, Wilkomirski was initially compared to Paul
Celan, Elie Wiesel, and even Primo Levi (Maechler 114), thus conferring authority by
proxy. This authority includes the sense that he was able to personally verify historical
occurrences; according to Taja Gut in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Wilkomirski is “one of the
most essential witnesses to the death camps” (qtd. in Maechler 113-4). The dark irony
with which these constructions of a brave, authoritative witness must now be seen
should not obscure their contingent factors. It would be unfair to criticize these initial
reviewers of Fragments for their unquestioning praise, as many factors would have
blinded them to the deception. Along with the sheer affective power of the story
Wilkomirski tells, there may, for example, have been a desire to be on the right side of
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the growing debate about Holocaust denial. Deborah Lipstadt’s book Denying the
Holocaust had appeared in 1993; the accused historian David Irving sued her in 1996,
the year Fragments appeared in English.
However, one aspect of the response that deserves closer attention is the way critics
ignored or even denied the literary qualities of the book, seeing Fragments as a direct
window onto the experience of the Holocaust – as a piece of pure content without form.
A review by Jonathan Kozol described Fragments as “free of literary artifice” (qtd. in
Hasian, 235). Arthur Samuels of Schocken Books, Wilkomirski’s New York publisher,
defended the text as follows: “I like it for its simplicity, humanity, lack of artifice” (qtd.
in Lappin, 49). Whatever the reasons for this response, it is clear that in reality the
opposite is the case. Fragments consists of a highly structured series of associative
flashbacks. It has a complex mix of narrative voices: the child Binjamin at various
ages, and the adult author who “remembers” both the original memories and the
supposed events to which they relate. It gains its power through a carefully crafted use
of pace, in which horrific revelations are gradually accreted alongside narratorial
interventions that highlight their traumatic after-effects. In contrast, the horrors
themselves, which include rats living in corpses and starving babies eating their own
fingers, now appear excessive, grotesque, and far-fetched. Therefore, perhaps it is not
the experiences that constitute the book’s power to persuade, but the way they are
represented: in short, the “artifice” of Fragments as a literary text. As J. J. Long points
out, readers who have the benefit of hindsight must now begin to evaluate these textual
elements: “The only way in which Wilkomirski-Grosjean’s text can be ‘rescued’ for
literary history is to refuse the proffered identification with the narrator and turn
attention to those formal techniques that proved so effective in creating the illusion of
authenticity” (62-3). The following analysis constitutes a contribution to this project of
retrieval.
Fragments opens with a series of claims about the nature of its narrator’s memory:
My early childhood memories are planted, first and foremost, in exact snapshots
of my photographic memory and in the feelings imprinted in them, and the
physical sensations. Then comes memory of being able to hear, and things I
heard, then things I thought, and last of all, memory of things I said. (4)
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This impressively comprehensive list, featuring sight, touch, hearing, affect, and both
internal and external speech, may help persuade the reader that what follows is a true
account. The narrator reinforces his adjective “exact” with the metaphor of
photographic development, and a few lines later backs this up with a further image:
“My earliest memories are a rubble field of isolated images and events. Shards of
memory with hard knife-sharp edges, which still cut flesh if touched today” (4). In
addition to appealing to the reader’s sympathy through shared knowledge of shards’
ability to wound, the sharpness of these fragments of memory suggests clarity.
Throughout the rest of the book the narrator intervenes with similar claims, supported
by metaphors like branding and scoring: “The image of the two boys in front of the
barracks door is burned into my mind” (60); “the last day in the room is embedded in
sharp contours in my mind, indelibly” (101). Yet these claims to certainty and clarity
are constantly undermined. Recollection is often “hazy” (113) or “all a blur” (115).
Time and place are vague: “I don’t remember any longer where it was, or when” (77).
Of course, these conflicting claims are consistent with the common experience of
memories from childhood, with their combination of powerful images and faded
certainties, and as such may even bolster the reader’s confidence and trust. But there is
a more subtle contradiction to the narrator’s memory claims, revealed by his labelling of
certain recollections as uninvited and unwelcome. A happy memory of sledding in Riga
is “quickly scared off by other ones, dark and suffocating, which push into my brain and
won’t let go” (5). Later, awakening from a nightmare in the safety of post-war
Switzerland, the narrator reports that he “had to think about” the time he was locked in
a dog kennel (40, emphasis mine). Again, in the Polish orphanage, a guilt-triggering
encounter with two new boys heralds the intrusion of unwanted memory, which now
has even greater physical force:
I couldn’t stop the vivid memories of the new boy in the big barracks. They [the
memories] forced me to lie still and for the thousandth time I had to be a
spectator at what had happened to the new boy in front of the barracks, and how
it was my fault and my crime. (58)
These experiences are of course consistent with the phenomenon of unwanted
“flashbacks” experienced by sufferers from post-traumatic stress disorder, but as I
argued in my first chapter these should be treated with caution. Indeed, the notion of
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Holocaust memories returning of their own accord, as a kind of literal return of the past,
has become a cliché ripe for satire. For example, in Jonathan Raban’s novel
Surveillance (2006), a character named “Augie Vanags” writes an account of his Jewish
childhood in Europe, “Boy 381”, that includes the usual mix of hiding and horrors.
Vanags professes to have written this book in just four weeks, having not thought or
spoken of that time for over sixty years. It just seems to write itself; as he comments to
a journalist: “A lot of it was news to me” (142).
Leaving aside the question of whether such returning memories can be trusted,
Wilkomirski’s account of his intrusive, unbidden thoughts is also, I would argue, a
denial of agency and evasion of responsibility. If the memories appear unbidden, the
narrator seems to suggest, it is not his fault if they turn out to be inaccurate or even
untrue. In the light of the book’s exposure as invented, this element may be read as an
unconscious admission of deception. Indeed, I would like to suggest that Fragments is
as deceptive on the level of the text as it is in the wider sense of a fraudulent claim to
remember the Holocaust.
A key aspect of this deception is the book’s false claim to give a child’s-eye
perspective. At the outset, the author of Fragments declares clear intentions regarding
narrative voice and point of view: “If I’m going to write about it, I have to give up on
the ordering logic of grown-ups; it would only distort what happened” (4). He will, he
says, relate only his unadorned memories, “with no benefit of perspective or vanishing
point” (5). Leaving aside the question of whether it is only “grown-ups” who benefit
from the faculty of logic, this claim to a child’s-eye perspective carries interesting
literary implications. Eskin argues that by giving up the adult point of view, the author
of Fragments enlists the reader as a kind of accomplice. The reader supplies details that
the author, to maintain a consistent child perspective, must miss out, according to Eskin:
Making sense of Fragments requires a certain level of involvement, and if you
suspend your tendency to apply logic, you must use your imagination. The
impressionistic descriptions often use a part to represent the whole: when the
child’s eye notices a menacing boot or a gray uniform, the reader must rely on
his prior knowledge of the Holocaust to fill in the rest of the malevolent Nazi
wearing it. The episodic, nonlinear narrative works the same way, requiring us
to connect the dots to create his biography. (30)
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While it is true that the text would be incomprehensible without some knowledge of the
Holocaust, and that we do indeed “connect the dots” while reading it, these factors are
no more pronounced than in any number of novels. This suggests that though Eskin
wants to complain about being hoodwinked and enlisted as an accessory to deception,
what he really objects to is fictional technique being used in an ostensibly factual
account.
Leaving aside for now this problem of genre, close attention to the text reveals that the
author of Fragments’ avowed intention to give an exclusively child’s-eye perspective is
in any case not achieved. If, after the opening statements, the adult voice never reappeared, except perhaps in the Afterword, we could perhaps suspend disbelief,
participate in the illusion, and agree that the author gives us his unadorned memories.
But Fragments offers no such consistency; the adult author constantly intervenes. For
example, at the beginning of the narrator’s journey across Europe, he boards a train
destined for “Lemberg” (L’vov). Here the re-entry of the adult voice is announced not
only with the introduction of hindsight but with a concurrent change of tense:
[child:] I don’t know what Lemberg is. It’s some kind of magic word, that stays
hanging and swaying in my head. It seems to be a place, maybe a town [. . .]
[adult:] We never reached Lemberg, and we never found the mysterious person
who was supposed to help us. Instead, this was the beginning of years that I
only slowly came to understand, when someone tried to talk hope into me again,
and took me on another long journey. (10, my additions)
If this is not the “benefit of perspective” then it is difficult to imagine what would be.
Again and again the adult voice returns. At the beginning of Chapter 9, the narrator
states that he owes his life to his friend Jankl; “I should write a whole book in his
honour, not just one pitiful little chapter” (72), he declares. The account of his
friendship with “Mila” moves from memories of their time together in Krakow to later
moments in the narrator’s adulthood: “Years later, when we were both grown up [. . .]”
(82). The child’s trauma resulting from seeing a rat emerge out of the belly of a corpse
is bolstered by an account of this event’s after-effects in adult life: “Many years later I
went with my wife for the birth of our first son. [. . .]. I wasn’t ready for this little halfhead of hair. All I could do was stand still and stare at it, and once again, like an echo
from before, I heard the ringing and crackling noise in my chest” (87). After walking
past the broken bodies of murdered children in the camp, the narrator tries to understand
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his attitude then in the light of his present self: “I often reproach myself, I can’t
understand how I could have felt nothing for the little ones back then. Although I was
just a child myself, was I already so brutalized that there was nothing left in me, no
sympathy, no pity, not even anger?” (105) The cumulative effect of these examples is
that although we may indeed have to fill in certain facts and details as we read, our
moral attitude and response to the narrator’s plight are carefully directed and
manipulated. The “dots” of the underlying message of the story have already been
joined by a narrator who cannot resist telling us what lessons we should be drawing
from his “memories”.
Meanwhile, the book’s very structure of associative flashback also implies the adult
perspective. Who else but a “grown-up” with “ordering logic” could have put together
this complex narrative? There are ten different time-spaces that enclose the episodes of
memory, which in “real-life” chronology are: country farmhouse, Riga, Majdanek,
forced march, another concentration camp, liberation, Krakow, Swiss waiting-room,
Swiss orphanage, and Swiss school. These are taken in non-chronological order and
gradually revealed through the simple device of memory association. Chapter 2 sees the
narrator waiting at a Swiss train station, where his temptation to trust friendly grownups leads to a memory of a “big gray man” in a concentration camp, who had indulged
in horse-play with the narrator before turning nasty and throwing him head-first at a
wall. Back in the waiting-room, everyone has left and the narrator is alone. This
triggers a very brief associative flashback of being abandoned in the country farmhouse.
The pattern continues throughout. Thus the narrative structure, like everything else in
the book, is predicated on affect, on how each memory inspires others through the
feelings they stir in the narrator. Such an approach, along with the expert way in which
the time-frames and tenses are handled, helps create a high level of narrative unity. We
do not feel ourselves to be at the mercy of a child’s disorganized memories, but in the
hands of an expert, adult author.
The deception involved in the false claim to be giving us the unadorned child’s view is
also present at the smallest level of syntax, as Sue Vice has shown. Vice argues that the
narrative voice of Fragments reveals the literary rather than autobiographical nature of
the text. Referring to the narrator’s statement that “I’m just an eye, taking in what it
sees, giving nothing back” (Wilkomirski 87), Vice says that this
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elides the distinction between character and narrator: the child may have been
such a recording device, but it is the adult narrator who is telling the story. This
utterance is an example not of reported speech or authentic testimony, but of the
much more literary free indirect discourse. The narrator’s voice is present along
with the character’s. (164)
While “free indirect discourse” is usually thought of only in relation to third-person
narration, Vice uses it here as shorthand for her Bakhtinian notion of “doublevoicedness”, in which “in each utterance there is present the representing and the
represented voice” (82). The point is that throughout Wilkomirski’s narration there are
two voices, adult and child, belying the narrator’s avowed intention to eliminate the
former.
This intention is also rather curious in itself. As Long argues, it contradicts the usual
order of narrative authority: “Wilkomirski’s narrative techniques are announced as selfconsciously eschewing what we would normally regard as indispensable elements of
narrative representation in order not to falsify the experience” (“Bernhard” 59-60,
emphasis in original). The irony, of course, is that the experience, the story set out in
Fragments, is indeed entirely “false”. There is a double deception at play here: not only
are the events fictitious, but the mode of their telling is not what is claimed. As Long
points out, Fragments is not a “direct representation of traumatic experience” but
“rather a constructed formal analogue of traumatic recall” (59, emphasis in original). I
would go further and argue that Fragments’ claim to be a representation of what is
(falsely) remembered now stands revealed as an unacknowledged act of (false)
remembering. It is in essence a performative gesture of deception, and remains so
whether we regard its author as a calculating fraudster, deluded fantasist, artful novelist,
or some combination of these.
Wilkomirski, then, falsely claims to give the unadorned perspective of a child, while
also denying agency and responsibility by alleging his memories to be unwanted and
intrusive. There is a third element to this litany of deception: the probability that some
of Fragments’ content was taken from other sources. This plagiaristic aspect divides
into three linked categories, which I will now take in turn: transformations of the real
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past, appropriation of others’ memories and identities, and unacknowledged literary
borrowings.
Maechler makes the case that some of the scenes in Fragments have roots in its author’s
real memories. Maechler tracked down René Aeberhard, who was a teenager when
three-year-old Bruno Grosjean was briefly fostered by Aeberhard’s family. Aeberhard,
now living in America, thinks that the sections in the book about life on a Polish
farmhouse are a transformed version of their brief period of childhood together in
Nidau, Switzerland. Aeberhard cites several details of geographical correspondence,
and also draws a parallel between his mentally unstable, sometimes aggressive mother
and the vicious farmer’s wife portrayed in Fragments. From this Maechler concludes:
“Wilkomirski-Grosjean did not have two heads; he had not led two lives. Instead, his
book tells his own life, the life of Bruno Grosjean – but with breathtaking alienation”
(229). This may or may not be provable by comparing each episode from Fragments
with events from its author’s life. However, such an approach is of limited use, being
essentially speculative, and reliant on conflicting claims. Indeed, Eskin, who
interviewed Aeberhard again after reading Maechler’s account, implies that the Swiss
émigré had anti-Semitic attitudes, and therefore “may not be an unprejudiced witness”
(239). Nevertheless the psychoanalytical line of argument followed by Maechler does
suggest that one element of Fragments’ falsity is a degree of self-deception in which the
author’s memories have become unnaturally distorted and mingled with fantasy.
A more grave accusation is that Wilkomirski stole some of his memories from people
he met during his Holocaust research and his own quest for identity. Maechler gives
several examples, including that of someone Wilkomirski claims to be his friend “Mila”
from Fragments. This woman now denies that she ever knew him as a child, and,
worse, alleges that he pursued and befriended her before stealing and misrepresenting
memories she told him in confidence: “I was his memory; he appropriated it” (qtd. in
Maechler 199). Again, such accusations are of limited value as they are reliant on
others’ testimony, and are based on amateur psychoanalysis of Wilkomirski from a
distance. Nevertheless they do contribute to the mounting evidence of deception at the
heart of Fragments.
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The third way Wilkomirski appears to have appropriated sources outside himself is
literary. As the journalist Elena Lappin noted on her visit to his countryside home,
Wilkomirski has amassed an enormous personal library of Holocaust papers, books,
films and photographs (16). It is possible to imagine Wilkomirski as a voracious reader
who has internalized some of these texts. There are certainly easy parallels to draw on a
literary level with, for example, Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (1965). Like
Fragments, this book depicts a vulnerable, victimized, yet strangely indestructible child
who is subjected to a fantastic array of horrors and acts of cruelty. Other
correspondences include the use of a first-person child narrator, the theme of the innate
barbarity of the Polish peasantry, post-war orphanages, plagues of rats, and loss of the
power of speech. As Anne Whitehead has argued, Wilkomirski probably took the idea
of using a child’s-eye perspective from Kosinski. Kosinski also appears to be a
plausible influence on Wilkomirski by virtue of his unconventional attitude to the
distinctions between memory, history, truth and fiction. As Whitehead notes,
Wilkomirski, like Kosinski, “displayed a notable tendency to internalize his own
fictions as part of his process of self-invention” (9). Kosinski, like Wilkomirski,
initially gained popularity for his work by inferring that it was autobiographical, before
retreating behind philosophical points about the blurred boundaries between truth and
storytelling. It is worth examining this link in more detail for what it reveals about
Wilkomirski’s project of false remembrance.
The early critical success of The Painted Bird in the mid-1960s owed much to Kosinski
spreading a rumour that it was based on his own life. Elie Wiesel, for example,
commented: “I thought it was fiction, and when he told me it was autobiography I tore
up my review and wrote one a thousand times better” (qtd. in Maechler 214). But in the
years following publication Kosinski was regularly found pontificating about the way
his book transcended simple genres. In a piece entitled “Afterward”, which prefaces the
1976 edition, he presented the book’s genesis as follows: “I decided I [. . .] would set
my work in a mythic domain, in the timeless fictive present, unrestrained by geography
or history” (xiii). Elsewhere, Kosinski compares The Painted Bird to Camus’ essay
Return to Tipasa, in which “the literal and the symbolic approach one another so closely
that from their confrontation arises the meaning” (qtd. in Vice 79). Notwithstanding
such attempts to distance his text from his biography, Kosinski continued to maintain
that he had indeed been separated from his parents during the war, and thereby suffered,
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if not the exact horrors of his novel, some level of persecution and privation. An article
in 198212 unearthed the truth. It turned out that he and his family had been sheltered by
members of the same Polish peasantry vilified as anti-Semitic brutes in The Painted
Bird. Kosinski’s credibility as an author was fatally damaged.
Wilkomirski, meanwhile, did not reach for such high-flown reasoning as Kosinski in his
prevarications, instead opting for simple denial that he had ever meant his book as a
truthful account. When Ganzfried broke the story, in 1998, Wilkomirski told a reporter
from the Zurich Tages-Anzeiger: “It was always the free choice of the reader to read my
book as literature or to take it as a personal document. Nobody has to believe me” (qtd.
in Gourevitch 51). This response constitutes a refusal to take responsibility for the
book’s effect. He later told Gourevitch: “I just wrote how these memories remain in a
child’s memory. That’s all. If afterward people treat the book as if it were an adult
expert’s report about the Holocaust, it’s completely stupid. But it’s their problem, not
my problem” (qtd. in Gourevitch 52). Though Wilkomirski never says so explicitly,
this denial that his work is factual implies that it can be taken as fiction. Like Kosinski,
his stance is to accuse others of “stupidly” trying to match his writing to verifiable facts,
while he remains aloof from such quotidian concerns.
Another Holocaust narrative of questionable veracity that may have influenced
Wilkomirski is Martin Gray’s For Those I Loved. First published in France in 1971 as
Au Nom de Tous les Miens, this memoir describes Gray’s experiences in the Warsaw
ghetto, escape from Treblinka death camp, stint as a partisan fighter, and role as a Nazihunter after the war. It was ghost-written by Max Gallo. When its success led to an
English translation in 1972, journalists found inconsistencies in the account and
suggested that parts of it may have been fabricated. Although Gray successfully
challenged this, and paperback editions and a film followed, the book later fell out of
print. Eskin wrote in 2002 that “in recent years it has been more or less forgotten by
everyone except those Holocaust ‘revisionists’ who invoke it as an example of the
unreliability of first-person accounts of the Holocaust” (75-6). Nevertheless a “35th
anniversary expanded edition” appeared in 2006, which makes virtually no reference to
Stokes, Geoffrey and Eliot Fremont-Smith. ‘Jerzy Kosinski’s Tainted Words’. Village Voice 22nd June
1982: 41-3. Useful overviews of the Kosinski scandal may be found in Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair
210-4, and Vice, Holocaust Fiction 67-90. Both draw on James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography
(London: Plume/Penguin, 1997).
12
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the former controversy. Instead, in a new foreword, the “Historian and New York
Times bestselling author” Dr. William R. Forstchen tries to turn the book, rather
bizarrely, into anti-Arab propaganda. Forstchen, who is best known as a sci-fi novelist
and co-author of “alternative histories” with politician Newt Gingrich, writes of “the
irrefutable proof that so clearly links the murderous anti-Semitism of Hitler’s thugs to
the current situation in the Middle East” – this “proof” being the alleged evidence of the
Grand Mufti’s collaboration in the persecution and destruction of the Jews. Linking this
with Gray’s text, Forstchen goes on to assert that For Those I Loved “is more relevant
[now] than when it was first published. [. . .] The evil that generated it still stalks the
world today” (xii).
Gray’s book certainly appears to have been relevant to Wilkomirski. There is a striking
similarity between Wilkomirski’s account of a horrific death on the streets of Riga, and
Gray’s description of an incident in the Warsaw ghetto. In Fragments, Wilkomirski
claims to witness an incident in which a man, “[m]aybe my father”, is murdered by
“Latvian militia”, who position him in front of a wall before driving a vehicle into him:
“No sound comes out of his mouth, but a big stream of something black shoots out of
his neck as the transport squashes him with a big crack against the house” (6-7). In For
Those I Loved, Martin Gray recalls that as a teenager in the ghetto, he “always dreamed
the same dream”:
We’d arrive in a narrow street, a dead end, and my father would be standing at
the end of it, standing against the wall. My mother and my brothers would run
toward him, and suddenly a heavy German truck would loom up, bear down on
them, about to crush them against the wall, and I couldn’t even cry out. (15)
This dream turns out to have been inspired by Martin’s memory of recently witnessing a
German truck careering through the ghetto; in the aftermath he sees, “[a]gainst a wall,
his arms still raised, [. . .] a man, crushed” (16). The incident in Fragments, then,
appears to originate in a memory claimed by Gray in a ghost-written account whose
veracity has been repeatedly challenged. It is transmuted by Gray into a dream that
reflects his fears for his father, before being adapted by Wilkomirski to account for the
lack of a father in his constructed story. This episode is not just another example of
Wilkomirski’s deception, this time by probable plagiarism. More crucially, the myriad
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layers of memory involved reveal just how far Fragments is from having any claim to
objective truth about the past.
But this is precisely the point; Wilkomirski is making no such claim. Instead he asserts
the opposite: that memories are valid and must be respected regardless of their
correspondence to historical fact or circumstance, because a person’s recollections
constitute his or her inviolable identity. This approach to remembrance is rooted in the
young Wilkomirski’s twin interests in contemporary history and his own developing
personality. During an interview, Maechler discovered that Wilkomirski undertook
doctorate-level historical research after he left school, and finds that he did so “not to
follow the career of a historian but to put his story into context and to understand it”
(57-8). Later, Wilkomirski befriended the psychologist Eli Bernstein, with whom he
concocted a “theory” of childhood memory and history that they began to present in
public in the early 1990s. Addressing a perceived gap in Holocaust studies,
Wilkomirski and Bernstein argued that oral testimony must be nurtured and drawn out
through an “interdisciplinary” therapeutic approach involving a historian and a
psychologist. The memories to be revealed by this method are those of people like
“Binjamin Wilkomirski”, that is, so-called “children without identity” who emerged
from World War II with no coherent past. While Bernstein took the psychologist role,
Wilkomirski appears to have acted as the historian. But Wilkomirski was also their
only client. Most of the examples they give in their talks are episodes from Fragments,
and virtually no other “patients” appear to have taken part. As Maechler says, in this
model Wilkomirski “verifies memories that he himself has constructed on the basis of
his own historical research” (257). A paper given by Wilkomirski and Bernstein, cited
by Maechler, is entitled: “The Child’s Memory as a Historical Source in Contemporary
History, as Exemplified by Surviving Children of the Shoah.” “Memory” and
“historical source” have become one.
Leaving aside the questionable merits of such an approach, the fact that it was
developed at the same time that Wilkomirski was writing down his “memories”
suggests that his and Bernstein’s theory was (probably unconsciously) designed to act
as a defence against accusations of fictionalising his past. Maechler says that the first
person to make this connection between the “memory as history” approach and the
genesis of Fragments was Jörg Lau, in an article in Die Zeit on 17th September 1998.
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Lau wrote that Fragments “was written in the spirit of a presumptuous psychotherapy
that believes it can provide meaning in life, indeed an ‘identity’, by accepting,
supporting, and authenticating as ‘historical reality’ anything the client may choose to
offer” (qtd. in Maechler 135). Indeed, in one of their talks Wilkomirski and Bernstein
assert that “the question of whether there is actual truth in the client’s early-childhood
memories is irrelevant for the psychotherapist” (qtd. in Gourevitch 59-60). This of
course is a distortion of the intentions of clinical practice, as Eskin points out: “The
Wilkomirski-Bernstein approach treats fragments of memory as clues not only to a
person’s ‘inner reality,’ the normal purview of psychotherapy, but to their ‘external
reality’ as well” (84). Wilkomirski’s approach to memory also draws on concepts of
trauma. As Gourevitch neatly summarizes, Wilkomirski’s defence in the face of attack
was “that a strictly factual reading of ‘Fragments’ is inherently misguided, because it is
a book of traumatic early memories, and that the broken and dislocated nature of such
memories requires them to be taken on their own terms, as evidence of the trauma they
record” (52). If this is so, then the memories can only be “evidence” of Wilkomirski’s
subjectivity, in what as Gourevitch points out is a circular argument that rules out any
appeal to external or objective proof.
In this respect, elements of Wilkomirski and Bernstein’s method and Wilkomirski’s
practical example of Fragments may be seen to chime with the rise of memory and
trauma as categories of discourse. However, critical analysis of the Wilkomirski affair
has been almost entirely censorious, suggesting that the theory of childhood memory as
historical source is a step too far. Most articles on Fragments give serious consideration
to the question of whether it matters that Wilkomirski’s memoirs do not correspond
with his actual past, and the vast majority conclude that it does, notwithstanding their
traumatic value. One line of argument from the critics is that false memoirs are
corrosive to human society, as they erode our faith in truth. Gourevitch, for example,
calls Wilkomirski’s project an act of “memory theft”, and a “feckless literary
adventure”. He paraphrases George Orwell: “every time we fail to use words with care
for their truthfulness, the honesty of everything we use words to express becomes
progressively forsaken” (68). Christopher Bigsby concurs, calling Fragments and other
problematic memoirs acts of “betrayal” (Remembering 374). For Bigsby, the inherent
instability of memory makes it an even more precious commodity: “When [memory] is
appropriated, falsified, such thefts and deceptions are no misdemeanours. They work to
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deny the common ground on which we stand and which is the necessary foundation for
present actions and future prospects” (376).
Such outrage perhaps overstates the potential of literature to cause harm in the wider
world. Nevertheless it usefully points to the way Fragments reveals assumptions of
ethical responsibility in writing. Another criticism based on such assumptions is made
by Carl Tighe, who finds the many episodes of horror and cruelty in Fragments to be
obscene and even sado-masochistic. Tighe is angered by the effect of these scenes:
“Wilkomirski trades on the gullibility of the reader, the willingness to believe all
horrors” (95). Tighe points out that there are glaring inconsistencies and improbabilities
in these episodes. For example, the excrement on the barracks floor that Wilkomirski’s
friend Jankl recommends he stand in to warm his feet would in all likelihood have been
icy liquid, since most of the child inmates had dysentery or diarrhoea. “To say that this
is unscrupulous play with the reader’s willing belief and sympathetic emotion is an
understatement. This is a kind of obscenity” (95). However, this criticism only gains
its validity through the benefit of hindsight. By linking ethical responsibility to
probability in narration, Tighe is perhaps on shaky ground. If Fragments had been
published as fiction, would his opinion have been the same? Tighe’s outrage is perhaps
more the result of indignation at having been deceived than any clear ethics of
representation.
Another line of criticism is based on literary conventions. Wilkomirski is held to have
broken Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact” or contract with the reader. He is also taken
to task for transgressing the boundaries of genre. Robert Eaglestone, for example,
complains that Fragments is both “parasitic” on, and a “parody” of, the genres of fiction
and memoir (127). Susan Suleiman, meanwhile, criticizes the book for denying the
existence of categories: “Wilkomirski’s book does not play with categories – it
obfuscates them, which is not the same thing. The problem with Fragments, as a text, is
precisely that it does not recognize, or at any rate does not admit, its own fictionality”
(169, emphasis in original). Suleiman here seems to demand an element of selfconsciousness or self-reflexivity, and this is indeed what is lacking in Fragments and
which is so prevalent in works by Sebald and Foer examined in later chapters of the
present study.
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For other critics, however, form and genre are beside the point. Omer Bartov reminds
us that earlier Holocaust memoirists, such as Tadeusz Borowski, Ida Fink, and Imre
Kertész, fictionalized their accounts to varying extents without causing widespread
outrage. The reason for this is that they were verifiably actually there in the camps and
ghettos, rather than safe in, for example, Swiss foster-homes. “Hence,” Bartov writes,
“the point is not merely fiction or truth, but presence or absence” (38). According to
this argument, our response to Fragments is conditioned by basic assumptions of
authenticity based on a reverence for the eye-witness who was present at the event in
question. Thus, the value of a writer like Borowski is that his readers may vicariously
witness the event for themselves through his text, whereas in Wilkomirski’s case they
merely gain access to the author’s imagination. This argument is based on a further
assumption: that Borowski’s memory can give us accurate access to the past. However,
if one takes the opposite view, that memory is intrinsically unstable, partial, and
untrustworthy, it is possible to argue that the veracity or otherwise of Fragments is
irrelevant. Michael Bernard-Donals takes this stance, arguing that Wilkomirski’s text
should be taken as a reminder that all remembrance is an illusion:
[. . .] the effect of the narrative in Fragments is not to remember the Holocaust –
we were not there, so we cannot remember it. Rather, in the face of the event’s
retreat into an irrecuperable past, we are required to bear witness to a trauma that
forced Bruno Dössekker to choose the language of the disaster to stand in for a
disaster of his own. Clearly his story doesn’t give us access to the historical
details he purports to describe. But it does provide us with access to the
structure of witness and the risks involved in testimony. (134)
Bernard-Donals takes the position that the very nature of (traumatic) memory precludes
any need to justify itself in relation to historical truth, which is precisely the argument
put forward by Wilkomirski and Bernstein in their theory of childhood memory and
history. Moreover, by focusing on the “structure of witness”, Bernard-Donals elides the
ethical and epistemological problems of historical knowledge in order to promote
testimony as a genre. As a consequence, despite seeming to denigrate memory for its
inability to access to the past, Bernard-Donals in fact exalts it for the way it strips away
the so-called illusion that there are historical “facts” to which one may lay claim.
This focus on memory-as-testimony has its roots in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s
Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992).
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Asserting that “our era can precisely be defined as the age of testimony” (5), Felman
and Laub emphasize both the therapeutic and epistemological value of taking the voice
of the witness seriously. Laub cites the case of a survivor who witnessed the Auschwitz
uprising. This woman, now in late middle age, remembered that four chimneys were
exploded during the action, but historians, when shown her videotaped testimony,
pointed out that in fact it was only one, and thus considered her account invalid.
However, for the psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor Laub, factual inaccuracy does
not weaken her testimony. For him, the important point is the effect on the woman of
the enormity of the event, the incredible fact that anyone managed to rebel at all in such
conditions. For Laub, she “was testifying not simply to empirical historical facts, but to
the very secret of survival and of resistance to extermination” (“Bearing” 62). Here we
can note Laub’s certainty that the historians are wrong in their emphasis on objective
truth, and his confidence that there is a more nebulous “secret” to be unveiled through
close attention to the nature of testimony. Gillian Banner, citing the same chimney
example, agrees with this position in her book Holocaust Literature: Schulz, Levi,
Spiegelman and the Memory of the Offence (2000). Banner argues: “It is in the
meeting-place of discrepant memories that we will find truths which transcend the
merely historical” (13). The promotion of memory over history could not be clearer.
Banner draws heavily on Lawrence Langer’s Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of
Memory (1991), in which Langer urges that we should learn to “hear” the voices of
survivors, as transmitted in the video interviews collected by the Fortunoff Project,
rather than project our own stories of survival and heroism onto them. For Langer,
close attention to both their words and manner of speech reveals troubling and
unresolved problems of “divided” and “diminished” selves for whom the Holocaust will
never be over. I deal with this argument in more detail in the next chapter.
Commentators like Laub, Langer and Banner, then, privilege the testimony of survivors
over the projections and viewpoints of those who come after. Moreover, for these
writers, the key attribute of testimony is its affective force. Rather than criticising
emotions for obstructing rational thought, as traditional historiography might (see
Hilberg, above), the affective power of traumatic memories is held to offer a key to the
experience of the Holocaust unobtainable by documents and objective hindsight.
Paradoxically, however, the extreme traumatic nature of this experience leads to the
claim that it was not witnessed as it occurred. As noted in Chapter 1 of the present
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study, Laub argues that “the inherently incomprehensible and deceptive psychological
structure of [the Holocaust] precluded its own witnessing, even by its very victims”
(“Event” 80). For Laub, it is only in the later moment of testimony that the event is
witnessed for the first time. Such a contention is based on a problematic view of
traumatic memory which holds that all experience is inherently belated. Testimony,
trauma, and memory are thus inter-related concepts in a line of thinking which moves
from the valorisation of Holocaust witnesses, to an emphasis on subjectivity and affect,
to the possibility of a “Binjamin Wilkomirski”, and finally to the defence of Fragments
by Bernard-Donals on abstract theoretical grounds.
This entire frame of reference is critiqued in an important article by Andrew S. Gross
and Michael J. Hoffman, “Memory, Authority, and Identity: Holocaust Studies in the
Light of the Wilkomirski Debate” (2004). Gross and Hoffman analyse what the
Wilkomirski affair reveals about the critical investment in testimony as a genre. They
argue that the affective power of testimony has become “authority”, replacing
“authenticity” as the means by which texts are evaluated. Thus, “we might provisionally
define ‘authority’ as a subject-position made unquestionable by virtue of its suffering”
(33). Gross and Hoffman seek to defend historical knowledge against this growing
affective authority of testimony and memory. Nevertheless, although the emphasis on
memory may be “at the price [. . .] of historical ignorance” (37), it does not necessarily
follow that the integrity of Holocaust studies is threatened:
The inaccuracy of [Wilkomirski’s memories] does not plunge us into a historical
crisis for the same reason that any number of make-believe Napoleons do not
discredit Waterloo. Rather, unstable memories plunge those who identify with
those memories into a crisis of identity. If we identified with [Wilkomirski] as a
victim, we are also implicated in his delusions of victimization. (42)
That is, by privileging the affective power of testimony we risk losing objective critical
judgement, as seen in exemplary fashion during the initial reception of Fragments.
Gross and Hoffman go on to suggest that this over-emphasis on the individual suffering
subject may perniciously obfuscate or divert attention from the wider socio-political
sphere, reducing the possibility of usefully addressing such problems as Israeli foreign
policy and how the United States should deal with its legacy of slavery. Gross and
Hoffman’s agenda reveals a fear that “history”, in the sense of attention to the wider
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picture, is under threat from “memory”, in its restricted focus on the victim. It also
serves to remind us of the high stakes attendant on this sometimes arcane philosophical
debate.
Fragments, then, has served as a test case and meeting point for the memory-history
debate. A very different text which nevertheless highlights similar problems attendant
on emphasising memory over history is Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (1996). Like
Fragments, this novel centres on the memories of a child survivor of the Holocaust. As
in Wilkomirski’s text, it relies on a trope of fragmentation, in which broken “pieces” of
memory are posited as symptoms of trauma to be healed through narrativization.
However, where Fragments makes great claims for memory (which are at their very
root deceptive), Fugitive Pieces advances more subtle arguments, figuring memory as a)
transmissible, b) redemptive, and c) akin to witness. All three of these are challenged in
the following analysis.
Anne Michaels was born in Toronto in 1958. Marita Grimwood writes in the online
Literary Encyclopedia that Michaels “has consistently refused to let details of her
personal life shift the focus of attention away from her writing” and has always declined
“to supply any but the most basic biographical information”. However, some details
have emerged. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature states that Michaels’
father was a “Russian immigrant”, while Grimwood says that he “came from a PolishJewish family and left the Polish-Russian border in 1931 at the age of 13 to settle in
Canada”. Unfortunately, we do not know the extent to which Michaels identifies with
this Jewish heritage, nor whether other relatives were left behind to suffer under Nazi or
Soviet regimes. Thus her relationship to the Holocaust may only be inferred from her
writings, which consist of three volumes of poetry (The Weight of Oranges [1986],
Miner’s Pond [1991], and Skin Divers [1999]), a few articles, and Fugitive Pieces itself,
to date her only novel (though a second, The Winter Vault, is due in 2009). Across this
oeuvre one theme is ever-present: memory – its meanings, uses, and metaphorical
utility.
Indeed, a preoccupation with methods of remembrance informs the very structure of
Fugitive Pieces. In the prologue, unnamed as such, a third-person narrator states that
although “countless manuscripts” from World War II were lost or destroyed, some were
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nevertheless “recovered, by circumstance alone”. Instead of such wartime artifacts,
however, the novel presents us with the ostensible memoirs of a child survivor of the
Holocaust, written in the 1980s and 1990s, which are recovered by a young acolyte after
the survivor’s death. Thus Fugitive Pieces is narrated first by the survivor, a poet
named Jakob Beer, and then by his literary executor, Ben, himself the son of (different)
survivors. This structure firmly embeds memory into the narrative and plot. Ben keeps
Jakob’s memory alive through the retrieval and publication of his writings. Ben’s
parents, Holocaust survivors who kept largely silent about their experiences, are
memorialized in their son’s account. Meanwhile, Jakob preserves the memory of his
adoptive father, the archaeologist Athos Roussos, by completing and publishing his
unfinished works. Jakob also memorializes his sister, Bella, from whom he was
irrevocably separated during the Nazi raid that killed his parents, but who remains as a
ghostly presence in his journal. Finally, Athos himself, in his book “Bearing False
Witness”, seeks to preserve the memory of Biskupin, the archaeological site desecrated
by the Nazis because it contradicted their account of “Aryan” history.
This emphasis on the preservation of memory is sustained throughout the novel in
archaeological metaphors that Michaels, through her narrators, nevertheless attempts to
disavow as such. Here, for example, Jakob is musing on how the memory of Holocaust
victims may be preserved:
It’s no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world, just as it’s no
metaphor to hear the radiocarbon chronometer, the Geiger counter amplifying
the faint breathing of rock, fifty thousand years old (like the faint thump from
behind the womb wall). It is no metaphor to witness the astonishing fidelity of
minerals magnetized, even after hundreds of millions of years, pointing to the
magnetic pole, minerals that have never forgotten magma whose cooling off has
left them forever desirous. We long for place; but place itself longs. Human
memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment. Eskers of ask wait to be
scooped up, lives reconstituted. (53)
This passage attempts to anthropomorphize nature. Froma Zeitlin glosses it as follows:
“Nature does not forget. Landscape is personified; it can be wounded by destructive
upheavals [. . .]; and it, too, solicits grief and empathy” (187). But if nature does not
forget, it must have some kind of “memory”. Rocks may carry the “trace” of radiation
from years ago, but is this simple phenomenon really akin to the complex workings of
(collective) human memory? What exactly does river sediment “remember”?
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Elsewhere, Michaels has developed this idea of “geologic memory” in relation to
architectural stone. In an article published in 1997, she writes: “Like human memory,
geologic memory can be a weakness or a strength. If building materials ‘remember’ the
quarry or the forge, so a site remembers its past. There’s nothing mystical in this; it’s a
pragmatic analysis of forces” (“Phantom Limbs”). Michaels’ disavowal of the
metaphorical and mystical consequences of her ideas does not bear sustained analysis.
Jakob’s wishful thinking in the passage above, in which Holocaust victims’ memories
are somehow preserved in air, mud and rock, seems to suggest that their deaths are not
absolute, particularly if a writer like him is around to “scoop up” the “ash” and
“reconstitute” their lives in prose. With this passage, Michaels seems to suggest that the
very configuration of the world and the cosmos will ensure that the Holocaust is never
forgotten. However, by this token, all deaths and catastrophes, being likewise part of
the wider scheme of things, will equally live on forever; this leaves the author open to
the charge of Holocaust relativism. Though this is probably not her intention, it is there;
it results from her attempt to conflate poetic sensibility with scientific research, to try to
understand the Holocaust by situating it in the known world of phenomena.
Michaels’ approach also relies on problematic notions of secondary or vicarious
witnessing. Elsewhere in Fugitive Pieces she goes further in her claims for the power of
memory. In the following passage, Jakob is pondering how meaning may be extracted
from the Holocaust:
The event is only meaningful if the coordination of time and space is witnessed.
Witnessed by those who lived near the incinerators, within the radius of smell.
By those who lived outside the camp fence, or stood outside the chamber doors.
By those who stepped a few feet to the right on the station platform. By those
who were born a generation after. (162, emphasis mine)
Here Jakob appears to equate survivors of the camps with people born after the war. As
the former draw on memory, the latter on imagination, this implies equivalence between
the two faculties. Like Wilkomirski’s claim that his “memories” are valid regardless of
their correspondence to historical fact, this conflation of memory and imagination under
the heading of witness obfuscates important ethical distinctions between truth and
fiction. This in turn leads to an implied claim that the author of fiction about the
Holocaust has the same status as one who gives testimony first-hand. But the question
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of who are the “true witnesses” to the event must always be seen in the light of Primo
Levi’s distinction between the sommersi (drowned) and the salvati (saved). Levi wrote:
I must repeat – we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. This is an
uncomfortable notion, of which I have become conscious little by little, reading
the memoirs of others and reading mine at a distance of years. We survivors are
not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their
prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so,
those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned
mute, but they are the ‘Muslims’, the submerged, the complete witnesses, the
ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we
are the exception. (Drowned 63-4)
If even Levi, as a salvati Auschwitz survivor, refuses to claim “complete” status as a
witness, how can those who were not alive then, such as Ben, or Michaels herself, do
so? In this light, the suggestion that the event can be made “meaningful” through
second-hand witnessing appears specious and presumptuous.
Nicola King, analysing Michaels’ passage quoted above, addresses the relation between
Levi and Michaels as follows:
Here he [Jakob] implicitly agrees with Primo Levi, for whom the survivors were
not the true witnesses, but who nevertheless felt the responsibility to bear
witness. It is a member of the ‘generation after’, his student Ben, who finds his
memoirs and thus becomes his witness. The author thus builds the question of
‘who bears witness for the witness?’ into the structure of her narrative. (“We
Come” 103)
Though Fugitive Pieces does indeed build vicarious witnessing into its narrative, there
is surely a difference between Levi’s position as survivor and Ben’s position as the son
of survivors. Levi’s argument that he is not a true witness highlights the fact that he did
not experience the Holocaust in the same way as, for example, someone who died in the
gas chamber. It does not deny that he witnessed, in the sense of seeing with his own
eyes, what happened at Auschwitz. Levi’s position should be considered qualitatively
different from that of Wilkomirski or Michaels, something which more self-reflexive
texts, such as those by Sebald and Foer, implicitly and explicitly acknowledge. These
latter authors self-consciously problematize their status as witnesses while nevertheless
exploring their urge to bear witness for the witness, as later chapters of the present study
will show.
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Interestingly, the claims of second-hand witness do have some medical backing. David
Pillemer, a Professor of Developmental Psychology, cites clinical evidence that
secondary witnesses, for example those who saw the events of “9/11” on television, or
who watched films of nuclear fallout in Hiroshima, can suffer from post-traumatic stress
disorder in the same way as those who experienced the events more directly. This is
because they create new memories for themselves whilst watching the material.
Pillemer writes: “Vivid memories, once created, carry with them an emotional intensity
that energizes future beliefs and behaviors, and this appears to be the case whether the
trauma was direct or indirect” (148). Another scientific article on the subject notes that
the 1994 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSMIV) changed the criteria for trauma. “To qualify as trauma exposed, one no longer
needs to be a direct victim. As long as one is confronted with a situation that involves
threat to the physical integrity of one’s self or others and one experiences the emotions
of fear, horror, or helplessness, then the experience counts as exposure to a PTSDqualifying stressor” (McNally et al. 47, emphasis mine). If this is so, it is possible to
argue that Michaels’ representative of the “generation after”, Ben, by being
“confronted” daily with the after-effects of Holocaust trauma in his parents, experiences
a comparable trauma that is just as clinically valid. Nevertheless this must be
distinguished from witnessing the experience as survivors did. To deny this
differentiation leads inexorably towards justifying the actions of a Wilkomirski.
A more subtle example of the way the problem of witness is foregrounded in Michaels’
novel is in the circumstances of Jakob’s Holocaust experience. The little boy does not
see the murder of his parents, but he hears it. When soldiers raid his home, he hides:
I was still small enough to vanish behind the wallpaper in the cupboard,
cramming my head sideways between choking plaster and beams, eyelashes
scraping.
[. . .]
The burst door. Wood ripped from hinges, cracking like ice under the shouts.
Noises never heard before, torn from my father’s mouth. Then silence. My
mother had been sewing a button on my shirt. She kept her buttons in a chipped
saucer. I heard the rim of the saucer in circles on the floor. I heard the spray of
buttons, little white teeth. (6-7)
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Thus Jakob hears various noises before emerging to find his parents lying dead. This
will haunt him in a specific way; as he says later, “I did not witness the most important
events of my life” (17). For Dalia Kandiyoti, this statement is “paradigmatic of the
hidden or very young child survivor, who, unlike adult survivors of atrocities, cannot
bear witness in the same way and always has to imagine the invisible” (310). This is
reminiscent of Wilkomirski’s claims that memories of child survivors deserve different
and more sympathetic treatment than those of adults, and that memory and imagination
carry equal weight.
Meanwhile, in Michaels’ schema, memory is not only analogous to (traumatized)
witness, but also, crucially, transmissible. The past is thought to be transmitted to us in
the present, whether through the radiation of rocks, or the “memory” of nature, as in the
examples above. Such ideas of transmission or transference are also expressed in
Fugitive Pieces as a poetic vision of memories passed on through love, which involves a
transcendence of the border between self and other. Jakob, describing his love for his
second wife, writes: “I cross over the boundary of skin into Michaela’s memories, into
her childhood” (185). Meanwhile, according to Ben, the frontier is crossed in the
opposite direction during the act of biography: “The quest to discover another’s psyche,
to absorb another’s motives as your own, is a lover’s quest” (222). Or it may be a
simple matter of knowledge. In order to emphasize how well he understands his wife,
Ben claims: “I know what she remembers. I know her memories” (285). This appears
presumptuous; elsewhere the process verges on the appropriative. Athos, in desperate
sympathy for young Jakob’s nightmares, says: “Jakob, I long to steal your memories
from you while you’re sleeping, to siphon off your dreams” (92). These are all
moments of over-identification, fantasies in which the other is transferred into the self,
or the self into the other. Indeed, they are reminiscent of Max Scheler’s ideas of
“heteropathic” and “idiopathic” identification, which, as I showed in Chapter 2 of the
present study, were disapproved of by Scheler himself, and later adopted by Kaja
Silverman only in terms of a radical sexual politics. As such, these modes of extreme
identification are inappropriate models for Holocaust representation when compared
with LaCaprian empathy, which seeks to maintain the border between self and other
rather than encourage its breach.
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The most extreme claim in Fugitive Pieces for memory transference, and consequently
of over-identification, arises from Jakob’s Holocaust research. Here he is considering
the fate of those who had the task of exhuming corpses:
When the prisoners were forced to dig up the mass graves, the dead entered
them through their pores and were carried through their bloodstreams to their
brains and hearts. And through their blood into another generation. Their arms
were into death up to the elbows, but not only into death – into music, into a
memory of the way a husband or son leaned over his dinner, a wife’s expression
as she watched her child in the bath; into beliefs, mathematical formulas,
dreams. As they felt another man’s and another’s blood-soaked hair through
their fingers, the diggers begged forgiveness. And those lost lives made
molecular passage into their hands. (52)
Later, this grotesque idea is repeated more succinctly: “They dug the bodies out of the
ground. They put their bare hands not only into death, not only into the syrups and
bacteria of the body, but into emotions, beliefs, confessions. One man’s memories then
another’s, thousands whose lives it was their duty to imagine” (279, emphasis in
original). As memories and emotions do not, literally, remain with decaying corpses,
and are therefore not available for “molecular” transmission, this passage can only mean
that the personal memories and emotions of the dead were (re-)created by the diggers,
in fulfilment of their “duty to imagine” the lives of the deceased. By extension,
Michaels implies that we all have a duty to recreate, through invention, the thoughts of
the dead, perhaps because they, murdered before their time, are unable to pass on their
memories through normal channels. Thus the project of writing Holocaust fiction is
defended on ethical grounds. But by making such an extreme claim for the power of
memory transmission, Michaels risks an ethically dubious identification with victims.
In the next chapter I show how W. G. Sebald avoids this problem by repeatedly stating,
through the voice of his narrative persona, that he “could not imagine” what it was like
for the victims of the past. Michaels’ narrative suggests the opposite: that we must try
to imagine the unimaginable. There is an important difference between being willing to
confront the horrors of the past in a general way, and over-identifying with the
perceived suffering of victims to the extent that emotions overwhelm rational thought.
The empathic balance between objectivity and subjectivity, distance and proximity, is
unlikely to be achieved by overstating the memorialising potential of memory
transmission through such channels as rocks, love, or blood. An over-emphasis on the
transferable qualities of memory is ultimately at the expense of more critical modes of
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thought. As Gross and Hoffman argue in their critique of the rise of memory as
testimony: “transference, and experiential connection between people, [has taken
precedence] over reference, the semantic connection between symbol and event” (37).
Moreover, the tendency to seek solace by such means, though understandable, must be
resisted. As King says of Michaels’ theory of memory transmission through the blood,
“the suggestion of a kind of immortality strikes me as a false consolation” (“We Come”
106). And it may even obfuscate the very events to which it refers; Middleton and
Woods argue that Michaels’ approach constitutes a “consolatory fantasy that actually
hides some of the horror” (40).
Sue Vice, analysing similarly “transcendent” moments in Fugitive Pieces, concludes
that “this seems to be a way of trying to wring aesthetic and meaningful comfort from
an event which offers no redemption of any kind” (9). However, Michaels’ central
theme is precisely redemption, figured as achievable through the power of memory.
Jakob’s life as a Holocaust survivor is one of mental suffering eventually redeemed by
drawing on his past to write valuable poetry, and by finding love with a second wife to
whom he can unburden himself. Meanwhile, Ben’s anguish, resulting from his
emotionally stunted childhood, is redeemed by his work of preserving Jakob’s memory,
which in turn leads to Ben’s realization of how to become happy with his wife (“I see
that I must give what I most need” [294]). In an article written in the same year as
Fugitive Pieces, Michaels muses on the redemptive power of memory:
Memory, like love, gains strength through restatement, reaffirmation, in a
culture, through ritual, tradition, stories, art. Memory courts our better selves. It
helps us recognize the importance of deed: we learn from pleasure just as we
learn from pain. And when memory evokes consideration of what might have
been or been prevented, memory becomes redemptive. As Yehudi Amichai
wrote: “to remember is a kind of hope”. (“Cleopatra’s Love” 181)
This brings to mind Yerushalmi’s view of collective Jewish memory, which is here seen
as a force powerful enough to redeem the past. In Fugitive Pieces, Jakob argues that
this quality stems from its oppositional relation to “History”:
History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral: what we consciously
remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, the
Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the
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Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue.
(138)
Thus Michaels, through Jakob, refutes Hilberg’s dictum that documentary evidence is
the only worthwhile source for understanding the past. But the example given of the
Totenbuch is problematic in several ways. Firstly, if we extend the abstract concept
“history” to its practitioners, historians, Michaels may appear to be aligning them with
genocidal Nazi administrators. Secondly, this Totenbuch was not amoral as such; it was
compiled with an agenda in mind, albeit one now usually considered immoral. Thirdly,
can it really be true to say that anyone, even the most objective historian, even a
Hilberg, can write with complete detachment, with no operation of conscience? Why is
conscience only available to those who mourn in the synagogue and not to those who
investigate facts and figures? Should history therefore be abandoned in favour of
memory on moral grounds?
Both Fugitive Pieces and Fragments, then, claim that the power of memory should take
precedence over the historical facts of presence and absence. These texts show that the
aggrandizement of memory leads towards a morally naïve and ethically dubious worldview which in turn creates problematic representations of the Holocaust. By creating a
false opposition between memory and history, Wilkomirski and Michaels reduce the
available options to a stark choice between over-identification and over-objectification.
Thus both Wilkomirski and Michaels arrive at a questionable over-identification with
victims rather than an empathic balance between proximity and distance. The following
chapters examine texts which to varying extents resolve this problem through selfreflexive narrative techniques.
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Chapter 4
A simultaneous gesture of proximity and distance: the empathic narrative persona
in W. G. Sebald’s “Paul Bereyter” and Austerlitz
W. G. Sebald’s prose narratives exist at the borderline of the novel form. Their selfconscious hybridity, combining memoir, historical account, travelogue and fiction, may
be seen as pushing the boundaries of genre. But Sebald’s use of a narrator-figure with
some biographical correspondence to the author, who takes part in the action, enables an
even greater crossing of borders: those between past and present, memory and history,
and current and previous generations. In this chapter, I argue that through the use of
what I call an “empathic narrative persona”, Sebald engages with, and to an extent
transcends, the ethical and epistemological problems of Holocaust representation, in
particular the dangers of identification with victims. I focus on two representative texts:
the story of “Paul Bereyter” from Die Ausgewanderten (1993; translated as The
Emigrants in 1996), and the novel-length Austerlitz (2001). These examples have
useful correlations, not least their shared concern with exile and loss. Sebald himself
noted the connection: “You might almost describe [Austerlitz] as a sequel to The
Emigrants” (Bigsby, “In Conversation” 162). By situating these narratives in the
context of the Sebaldian persona, I show how the author self-reflexively foregrounds the
process of LaCaprian empathy by establishing close personal connection with the
victims of history while simultaneously constructing texts that are characterized by
several layers of structural and epistemological distance. In this way he approaches the
horrors of the Holocaust in an oblique manner that neither over-identifies with nor
objectifies its victims.
That Sebald was conscious of such ethical issues is shown by his comments in
interviews. For example:
Anything one does in the form of writing, and especially prose fiction, is not an
innocent enterprise. It is a morally questionable enterprise because one is, of
course in the business – however honest one attempts to be as a writer – of
arranging things in such a way that the role of the narrator is not an entirely
despicable one. There is no way around this. [. . .]. Writing is by definition a
morally dubious occupation, I think, because one appropriates and manipulates
the lives of others for certain ends. When it is a question of the lives of those
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who have survived persecution the process of appropriation can be very
invasive. (Bigsby, “In Conversation” 153)
Nevertheless, the subject central to much of Sebald’s work is precisely “the lives of
those who have survived persecution”. So the question is: how does he deal with the
problems of appropriation and invasion, and what part does the “role of the narrator”
play in this negotiation?
The “I”-figure is a major element in Sebald’s work. This narrator imposes himself on
the first pages of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz, and only waits
until the second section of Vertigo, “All’estero”, to make his presence felt. His multiple
functions include the describing of hallucinatory travels through Suffolk and Central
Europe, including a return to the village of his childhood; the recounting of journeys of
the mind through philosophy, literature and history; acts of meeting, listening to and
recording the memories of exiles and emigrants, and their friends and relatives, both
real and fictional; and the investigation of sites of both historical and personal
importance. The narrator-figure brings all these elements together, in a powerful
personal vision of destruction and decay. Structurally, meanwhile, he narrates the past
of his travels and encounters, while simultaneously appearing as the present writer of
his narration. He offers personal biographical information: “In the second half of the
1960s I travelled repeatedly from England to Belgium” (Austerlitz 1); “Until my
twenty-sixth year I had never been further away from home than a five- or six-hour train
journey” (Emigrants 149). He also recounts detailed insights into his physical and
psychological condition, fearing at one stage that “mental paralysis was taking hold of
me” (Vertigo 36), while at another being “alarmed by what I feared was the progressive
decline of my eyesight” (Austerlitz 47). Despite these details he remains obscure, a
“shadowy pronoun” (Atlas 283), a “spectral annunciatory presence that engenders the
texts” (Blackler 93).
Susan Sontag argues that Sebald’s narrator is a relatively familiar figure, “the
promeneur solitaire of many generations of romantic literature” (3). Another way we
might situate him in terms of tradition is by comparison with Walter Benjamin’s
“Storyteller”, who, like the Sebaldian narrator, embeds himself in the stories he tells.
For Benjamin, storytelling
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does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a
report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of
him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the
handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel. Storytellers tend to begin their
story with a presentation of the circumstances in which they themselves have
learned what is to follow. (91)
On one level, this is exactly what the Sebaldian “I”-figure does. In Rings of Saturn, it is
the narrator’s walk across Suffolk that frames the story. Austerlitz begins with an
account of the circumstances by which the narrator came to be in the Antwerp waitingroom in which he first meets the protagonist. Meanwhile, part of the function of the
narrator of The Emigrants is to show how he came upon the stories he is to tell.
However, this personalisation is but one element of the Sebaldian narrator, who as this
chapter will show is a complex and innovative construction designed for the particular
situation of the late twentieth century writer who looks back on that century’s horrors.
In order more clearly to define the Sebaldian narrator it may help to compare his details
with the author’s biography, as the two are so intimately connected. Winfried Georg
Maximilian Sebald, “Max” to friends and colleagues, was born on 18 May 1944 in
Wertach im Allgäu, a village in the Bavarian Alps of Germany. Before he reached
double figures his family moved to nearby Sonthofen. Large numbers of Sebald’s
forebears had immigrated to New York in the 1920s, including all his mother’s siblings.
Sebald has described his parents as being from “conventional, Catholic, anti-communist
backgrounds” (Jaggi 6). His father found advancement in the army during the Nazi
period and participated in the Polish campaign at the beginning of World War II. His
late return in 1947, after being held as a prisoner of war in France, meant that he
initially seemed a stranger to his infant son. After this difficult beginning the two had a
strained relationship. Moreover, the father’s refusal to speak about his wartime
experiences was a key factor in his son’s increasing interest in the subject. Sebald was
once asked whether he ever resolved matters with his father, and responded: “We never
had that conversation. You didn’t know what your parents had done, but, perhaps more
decisively, you didn’t even know what they had seen or not seen. And the question, to
mind now, is: What did they witness? What did they see?” (Bigsby, “In Conversation”
143) Thus while Sebald appears to have given up on ever finding out whether his father
took part in atrocities, he has transmuted his personal conflicts and intellectual curiosity
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into his writing, both in the prose narratives analysed in this chapter and in his analysis
of post-war German consciousness, as in the lectures on “Air War and Literature” which
appeared in English, alongside other essays, as On The Natural History of Destruction
(2003).
From 1963-6 Sebald studied German and comparative literature in Germany and
Switzerland. While at Freiburg University he followed the Frankfurt trial of former
Auschwitz personnel, and experienced an awakening to the recent history he had
previously ignored. Disenchanted with central Europe, from 1966-70 he worked as a
Lektor or German language assistant at the University of Manchester, apart from a year
schoolteaching in Switzerland. He married an Austrian, Ute, in 1967; they had one
daughter, Anna, who became a teacher. In 1970 he settled permanently in England,
taking a job at the University of East Anglia in Norwich as a Lecturer in German
Literature. Apart from a brief stint at the Goethe Institute in Munich during 1975, he
remained for the rest of his life at UEA, receiving a Personal Chair in European
Literature in 1988. Having hitherto published only academic material, Sebald began to
write more personal work in the late 1980s, beginning with the long poem Nach der
Natur: Ein Elementargedicht (1988), translated as After Nature (2002). Fragments of
prose that he had been assembling began to appear in print, progressively increasing in
narrative coherence. Schwindel. Gefühle (1990) was translated as Vertigo (1999); Die
Ausgewanderten (1993) as The Emigrants (1996); and Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine
Englische Wallfahrt (1995) as The Rings of Saturn (1998). When visited by the writer
James Atlas in 1999, he was living in “a redbrick Victorian manor with tall windows
and a manicured lawn in a suburban cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Norwich” (Atlas
288). Sebald died in a car crash on 14 December 2001, shortly after the publication of
Austerlitz, a book that came closer to the form of a novel than any of his previous
works. Campo Santo, a collection of prose fragments and essays, appeared
posthumously in 2003, and was translated into English in 2005.
For comparison, a partial “biography” of the Sebaldian narrator may be constructed by
referring across all four complete prose narratives. For example, we learn about his
place of birth during the long final section of Vertigo, “Il ritorno in patria”, which
recounts a visit to the German village of “W”, “where I had not been since my
childhood” (171). In the “Paul Bereyter” section of The Emigrants, meanwhile, we hear
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about the narrator’s later childhood in the nearby town of “S”. These two single-letter
towns, which appear throughout his books, would appear to refer to Sebald’s real
childhood homes of Wertach im Allgäu and Sonthofen, yet according to the author they
“have more of a symbolic significance than anything [. . .] in the texts they are in fact
imaginary locations” (Bigsby, “In Conversation” 141). While this statement may be
influenced by a desire not to offend or compromise the real inhabitants of Wertach and
Sonthofen, it does not quite account for the feebleness of the disguise. In each of the
books, the author’s biography offered by the publisher names his birthplace, so it does
not take a large amount of detective work on the part of the reader to match it up to
“W”.
This ambiguity of purpose is repeated in other aspects of the narrator’s biography. His
basic history usually, but not always, matches that of Sebald. In the story of “Max
Ferber” in The Emigrants, the narrator arrives in Manchester in 1966, and describes
how he “left the city in the summer of 1969 to follow a plan I had long had of becoming
a schoolteacher in Switzerland” (176). These facts chime perfectly with Sebald’s
biography. But the “All’estero” section of Vertigo contradicts this: “In October 1980 I
travelled from England, where I had then been living for nearly twenty-five years” (33).
Sebald, and indeed the narrator of “Max Ferber”, had only been living there for fourteen
years, so there is not even consistency between the narratives, let alone between Sebald
and his narrator.
Another dimension to the narrator’s biography is that of friends and relatives. Sebald
has confirmed that the story of “Ambros Adelwarth” in The Emigrants is based on his
real great-uncle. In an interview he stated that, as in the published narrative, “there was
within my family another story and that is the story of all my uncles and aunts who left
southern Bavaria in the late 20s, during the Great Depression, to go to New York”
(Turner 22). The telling of “Ambros Adelwarth”, as with most Sebaldian texts,
involves using the narrator’s story as a framing narrative. He recounts how, despite
developing an “aversion to all things American” in his teenage years, he “did eventually
fly to Newark on the 2nd of January 1981. This change of heart was prompted by a
photograph album of my mother’s which had come into my hands a few months earlier
and which contained pictures quite new to me of our relatives who had emigrated
during the Weimar years” (Emigrants 71). However, the photograph reproduced on this
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page, of a family at table, is not of Sebald’s relatives, a fact the reader could not know
without having read interviews with the author. The precision of the date and the
apparent authentication provided by the photograph prove to be highly misleading.
Sebald has not just changed the names of his relatives to preserve anonymity; he has
included photographs of unknown others to stand in for them. Other personal
connections that flit in and out of the books include the real writer Michael Hamburger
(in Rings of Saturn) and the narrator’s partner “Clara”, who participates in small but
notable ways in Vertigo and The Emigrants. If Clara corresponds in any way to
Sebald’s real wife Ute – which is not known, but possible, given how others are used –
why does she take on a different name while Hamburger retains his own? Indeed,
naming varies throughout Sebald’s oeuvre. “Paul Bereyter” is the real name of Sebald’s
teacher from Sonthofen, but “Max Ferber” and “Austerlitz” are invented names
signifying composites of people known to the author and public figures alive and dead.
(“Ferber”, or “Auerbach” in the German original, comprises the painter Frank Auerbach
and Sebald’s 1960s Manchester landlord. “Austerlitz” combines an anonymous
architectural historian friend of the author and the Kindertransport survivor Susi
Bechhöfer.) Inconsistency and ambiguity are once again the hallmark of Sebald’s use
of names and people.
My final example of the shifting relationship between author and narrator relates to the
opening of Rings of Saturn:
In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the
county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me
whenever I have completed a long stint of work. And in fact my hope was
realized, up to a point; for I have seldom felt so carefree as I did then, walking
for hours in the day through the thinly populated countryside [. . .]. I wonder
now, however, whether there might be something in the old superstition that
certain ailments of the spirit and of the body are particularly likely to beset us
under the sign of the Dog Star. At all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied
not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing
horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces
of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that
remote place. Perhaps it was because of this that, a year to the day after I began
my tour, I was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total
immobility. (3)
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“Dispelling the emptiness”, “ailments of the spirit”, “paralysing horror”, “state of
almost total immobility”: the cumulative effect of these phrases is surely to encourage
the idea that the narrator’s internment in hospital, revealed on the next page, is the result
of psychological or emotional disturbance. This is compounded by the next section,
which describes the narrator’s increasingly tenuous hold on reality. Indeed, as Maya
Jaggi relates, “one reviewer assumed he had been incarcerated in a mental asylum” (6).
Yet as Sebald explained:
“Walking along the seashore [of East Anglia] was not comfortable – one foot
was always lower than the other. I had a pain, and the following summer, I
stretched, and something broke in my back.” Threatened with paralysis, he had a
four-hour operation for a shattered disc. (Jaggi 6)
Thus Sebald has taken a prosaic incident from his own life and subtly transformed it for
his “I”-narrator into some more nebulous, suggestive, and literary. The exact
relationship between author and narrator is never set fast, but hovers in a state of
ambiguous uncertainty.
How then might we begin to define this ambiguous narrator? The vocabulary of
narrative theory might add clarity. In Genette’s terms, he is clearly a homodiegetic
(present within the story) narrator. But is he the hero of his tale (autodiegetic), or the
observer-witness? The latter seems most plausible, yet he is more than merely a
“bystander” (Genette 245), given his level of personal involvement and complicity.
These categories begin to seem insufficient. Perhaps we might consider Sebald’s “I”figure as a personification of the “implied author”, the category Wayne Booth suggested
was akin to “the author’s ‘second self’” (71). But as Rimmon-Kenan points out in her
analysis of these terms, the implied author is, in contradistinction to the narrator, a
voiceless entity created by the reader’s interaction with the text, who, therefore, “cannot
literally be a participant in the narrative communication situation” (88). It seems that
new categories might have to be invented. Nicola King calls the Sebaldian narrator a
“neutral mouthpiece, not intruding with his own response or experience” (“Structures”
274). This idea might encourage a simplistic psychoanalytic reading in which the
narrator is held to act as a “therapist” distanced from his “patients” (characters) by a
posture of professional neutrality. Another analogy suggested by the idea of neutrality
is that the narrator is akin to a kind of journalist or archivist whose work involves
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collecting the testimony of others. Both Mark Anderson and Lilian Furst argue that
Sebald’s texts, in particular The Emigrants and Austerlitz, depend on “reported speech”
(Anderson 106, Furst 87). For Anderson, the narrator presents others’ lives “not as they
‘really happened’ but as they were ‘really reported’ to him” (107). The question
remains, however, how far this supposedly neutral and objective listener intervenes and
manipulates the material “reported” to him. On the one hand, it is notable how during
long periods of narration by other characters, the narrator seems to melt away. For AnaIsabel Aliaga-Buchenau: “The narrator disappears as mediator between the character
and reader” (149). Yet the repeated grammatical reminders (“said Austerlitz”, “said
Ferber”), mitigate against this absence; as Furst points out, Sebald’s discourse is in fact
“cited speech, which never allows us to forget the mediating presence of the narrator”
(87). This apparent contradiction between presence and absence is at the heart of
Sebald’s project. As the analysis below will show, it corresponds to the simultaneous
movements of proximity and distance found in both the content and structure of his
prose narratives.
The ambiguous stance taken by the Sebaldian narrator is not without its socio-political
implications. As Philip Schlesinger has noted, the apparent posture of bearing witness
adopted in Austerlitz should not be taken at face value, knowing what we do of Sebald’s
biography. Schlesinger reminds us that “behind the narrator is a German writer-in-exile
who chooses to bear witness to Jewish suffering” (50). While Sebald is not quite an
exile – more an emigrant, as we will see – and bears witness to non-Jewish suffering
too, his nationality is undeniably important. Indeed, Helmut Schmitz even sees the
narrator as a member of the “perpetrator collective” (310). Yet such analyses conflate
the author with the narrator, which, though understandable given the close relation
between the two, is nevertheless to make a crucial misunderstanding. I would like to
suggest that the way to avoid this problem is to consider Sebald’s “I”-narrator neither as
the mouthpiece of the author, nor as a reporter, therapist, observer or witness, but
instead in terms of a persona. Originally the mask worn by actors in Classical Greece,
persona has come to mean a part that is played, whether in writing or ordinary life. Its
designation of “an assumed character or role, esp. one adopted by an author in his or her
writing” (OED) dates back to the 1732 preface to Paradise Lost, and has since gained
wide currency in both poetry and prose. The second, related definition, “the aspect of a
person’s character that is displayed to or perceived by others” (OED), only emerged in
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the twentieth century, and it was this connotation that Jung adopted as a contrast to the
inner being or anima. This idea of the aspect of oneself that one chooses to show, while
keeping other characteristics hidden, may be useful in Sebald’s case. Rather than
“appearing” in his books as himself, he is perhaps appearing as someone else with the
same name. (Although he is never named in the texts, the reproduction of the narrator’s
passport on page 114 of Vertigo clearly shows the name “W Sebald”.)
Many other writers have appeared in their own fictions. John Fowles, for example,
describes his unlikely appearance on a Victorian train, sitting opposite his character
Charles Smithson towards the end of The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), in order
to dramatize the author’s indecision as to whether Charles deserves a happy ending.
Another instance would be the way “Martin Amis” intervenes in Money (1984), writing
a screenplay for and playing chess with his protagonist (in a posture Richard Todd
terms the “intrusive author”). But these are clearly playing a different role to the
Sebaldian narrator, not least in the fact that they are essentially walk-on parts. Another
possible comparison is with travel writers. Indeed, Bianca Theisen, in an article from
2004, argues that Sebald’s work should be considered primarily in terms of this genre.
Certainly, a comparison with certain types of travel writing might be productive. For
example, the narrators of such works as George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and
London (1933) and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (1987) are, arguably, semifictionalized versions of their authors, personae whose actions cannot be said always to
correspond with the real-life experiences on which the narratives are based. Yet to
invoke Genette’s categories once again, these examples correspond to the “ideological”
or didactic function, in their emphasis on raising awareness, here of Parisian kitchens
and Australian outback culture. Sebald’s narrative persona is closer to Genette’s
“testimonial” function, which “may take the form simply of an attestation, as when a
narrator indicates the source of his information, or the degree of precision of his own
memories, or the feelings which one or another episode awakens in him” (Genette 256).
The Sebaldian persona does all of these things while notably avoiding didacticism.
Genette’s definition also distances Sebald from the “Philip Roth” who appears in such
fictions as Operation Shylock (1993) and The Plot Against America (2004), or the “Bret
Easton Ellis” who appears in Lunar Park (2005). Certainly, Roth’s and Ellis’s alteregos are, like Sebald’s, composed of an ambiguous mixture of fiction and true
biography. Yet in these works the focus is on the author’s psycho-dramas (in Genette’s
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terms, autodiegetic), whereas in Sebald we find a much greater interest in the stories of
others.
None of these points of comparison, then, seems adequate. Indeed, the impetus for the
Sebaldian persona comes partly from the author’s disdain for other forms of narrative.
He told one interviewer: “There’s still fiction with an anonymous narrator who knows
everything, which seems to me preposterous” (Jaggi 6). Instead, Sebald, an expert on
Austrian literature, created a structure influenced by the work of Thomas Bernhard. For
Sebald, Bernhard “only tells you in his books what he has heard from others. So he
invented, as it were, a kind of periscopic form of narrative. You’re always sure that
what he tells you is related, at one remove, at two removes, at two or three” (Silberblatt
83). Thus, Sebald says, “I content myself with the role of the messenger” (Jaggi 6).
However, this is somewhat disingenuous. As shown in the analysis above, Sebald’s
narrator comes with an (admittedly shadowy) personality and biography of his own,
which the reader cannot help but relate to the author to a varying extent dependent on
his or her knowledge of Sebald’s own history. Indeed, Jaggi, quoting a friend of
Sebald, suggests that this reveals an element of playfulness on the part of the author:
“He [the narrator] has obvious affinities with Max, but it’s playing on our naivety,
because the reader is always tempted to identify the narrator with the writer. He’s
taunting us” (Jaggi 6).
Sebald himself has stated that his use of an ambiguous narrator, along with his mixture
of fact and fiction and insertion of photographs of variable quality and doubtful
provenance, are all intended precisely to create uncertainty in the reader:
It’s the opposite of suspending disbelief and being swept along by the action,
which is perhaps not the highest form of mental activity; it’s to constantly ask,
‘What happened to these people, what might they have felt like?’ You can
generate a similar state of mind in the reader by making them uncertain. (Jaggi
6)
This uncertainty or unsettlement means that the reader can never adopt a stance either of
identification with the narrator and his subjects nor of objective, privileged insight into
their lives. Instead, as Deane Blackler observes, the method serves to encourage a
“disobedient” and “adventurous” reader. For Blackler, Sebald’s narrators “foreground
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the reader’s dialogical self [. . .]. Because the narrator’s first-person voice is a selfconstructed fiction, the reader is free to play in the textual spaces he “creates”, free to
disobey the seeming authority of a voice writing artifice” (100).
My contention is that beyond these elements of on the one hand “taunting” the reader,
and on the other encouraging his or her participation (disobedient or otherwise), the
result of Sebald’s narrative technique is what I call an “empathic narrative persona”.
Empathy in LaCaprian terms is a simultaneous combination of proximity and distance,
an acknowledgement of one’s feelings for the suffering other while retaining awareness
of the other’s alterity, a mixture of identification and understanding in the same gesture.
Sebald’s testimonial posture of messenger privileges an empathic relation to his
subjects, in that it includes, whilst simultaneously disavowing, the “feelings which one
or another episode awakens in him” (Genette 256). But beyond this, the use of the
persona also enables empathy at the structural level. The narrative itself may be seen as
empathic in that by inserting a persona between the author and the subject Sebald
achieves a critical level of distance while nevertheless engaging “in person” with his
characters. The examples below will illustrate this dual empathy which occurs at the
level of both content and form.
“Paul Bereyter”, the second of four narratives that make up The Emigrants, tells the
story of the narrator’s erstwhile schoolteacher in post-war Germany. Unlike the others
in this volume, this biographical sketch and its photographs are, according to the author,
“completely authentic” (Bigsby, “In Conversation” 155), with the exception of certain
minor elements of colour imported from Wittgenstein’s biography. Thus both historical
truth and personal memory are at stake. The story opens with the narrator learning of
Paul’s suicide on a train-track in 1984, through an article in the local paper which fails
to account for the contradictions of the teacher’s life. The narrator decides to embark on
“investigations” (28) of his own. Initially, we learn, fond memories of Paul and
thoughts of his sad end led him towards a series of introspective conjectures:
And so, belatedly, I tried to get closer to him, to imagine what his life was like [.
. .]. I imagined him lying in the open air on his balcony where he would often
sleep in the summer, his face canopied by the hosts of the stars. I imagined him
skating in winter, alone on the fish ponds at Moosbach; and I imagined him
stretched out on the track. (29)
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The narrator goes on to relate how he “pictured” Paul lying down on the track to await
the approaching train, before concluding:
Such endeavours to imagine his life and death did not, as I had to admit, bring
me any closer to Paul, except at best for brief emotional moments of the kind
that seemed presumptuous to me. It is in order to avoid this sort of wrongful
trespass that I have written down what I know of Paul Bereyter. (29)
Since the rest of the story is an apparently dispassionate account of Paul’s life, drawing
on the recollections of those who knew him and on documentary evidence, it is
tempting to take the narrator at his word and assume that “imagining” has been rejected
in favour of a respectful, distanced objectivity. Indeed, the critic J. J. Long appears to
accept this in his initial remarks on this passage. Long interprets the narrator’s early
attempts to “imagine” and “picture” as a reflection “on the epistemological and ethical
inadequacy of empathy”, and says of the “wrongful trespass” comment above that
“[e]mpathy is thus rejected as a form of unacceptable transgression” (“Intercultural
Identities” 524). I will return to Long’s arguments later, but for now these (decontextualized) comments are useful in understanding how Sebald’s narrative is, on the
contrary, “empathic” in the particular sense used in this study. Long’s analysis appears
to presume two things: firstly, that imagining and empathy are identical; secondly, that
the rest of the “Paul Bereyter” section contains no further element of either. Both these
apparent presumptions are soon problematized with detailed analysis, which will show
that Sebald’s gesture in this passage is in fact precisely one of empathy in the LaCaprian
sense of simultaneous proximity and distance.
I will begin with a closer look at the Sebaldian narrator’s statement that he wishes to
avoid “wrongful trespass”. Despite this passage’s apparent aim of distancing the
subject from the narrator, it nevertheless contains within it the seeds of personal
involvement and proximity. By the narrator’s own admission, his attempts at
“imagining” are rejected, in part, because they did not “bring [him] any closer to Paul”,
suggesting that this is still his wish, should there be a way to do so that avoids
“wrongful trespass”. Indeed, no other motive for writing the story is given. There is
also an intriguing ambiguity contained within the apparently ingenuous statement that
the narrator has “written down what [he] know[s] of Paul Bereyter”. As Mark
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McCulloh has pointed out, an adjacent phrase from the original German text, “im
Verlauf meiner Erkundungen”, which McCulloh translates as “in the course of my
enquiries”, has been left out of the English translation of this passage. McCulloh argues
that this has the effect of “de-emphasizing the narrator’s active role in the construction
or reconstruction of Paul Bereyter’s last years”. McCulloh continues: “The brevity of
the English discards or at least sublimates the notion of search and discovery from the
narrator’s attitude towards his account” (“Introduction” 16). These ideas of search and
discovery implied by “enquiries” suggest a much more active personal involvement on
the narrator’s part than “written down what I know”. However, Sebald’s choice of
word, “Erkundungen” has a meaning closer to “reconnaissance” than to “enquiries”
(usually “Erkundigungen”). Reconnaissance, with its implications of militarism or
scientific non-engagement, would seem to distance the narrator from his subject rather
than bring him closer. Yet this choice of word works as a counterweight to what
Michael Hulse’s translation renders as merely “brief emotional moments” but which the
original German – “Ausuferungen des Gefühls” (45) – implies are excessive and
overwhelming (Ausufern – “to burst or break its banks” [Collins Dictionary]). As
Sebald’s German original expresses the whole passage in one sentence (where Hulse
uses two), the use of the term “Erkundigungen” may be seen as a stylistic repression of
the overflowing emotionality of “Ausuferungen” in a perfectly balanced linguistic
gesture of LaCaprian empathy.
This blend of personal connection and consciously imposed distance may also be found
in the wider trajectory of the narrative. The first movement the narrator makes is
towards proximity. Immediately after the passage above, he introduces his own story
and shows how it intersects with Paul’s: “In December 1952 my family moved from the
village of W to the small town of S., 19 kilometres away” (29). “S.” turns out to be
where Paul lives and teaches, and the narrator gives a vivid account of what it was like
to be in that gifted educator’s class. He also subtly portrays the emotional feelings that
arise when remembering those childhood days. Describing Paul’s habit of expertly
whistling while leading the schoolchildren on mountain walks, the narrator comments
that these once mysterious melodies “infallibly gave a wrench to my heart whenever,
years later, I rediscovered them in a Bellini opera or Brahms sonata” (41). Even more
revealingly, the narrator implicitly claims affinity with Paul through common “exile” or
“emigrant” status. Paul was exiled to France before the war on account of his three-
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quarter Aryan status, and then endured a kind of internal exile fighting in the German
army before returning to S. after the war to live once again among those who had
previously shunned him. The result of these vicissitudes is seen in Paul’s journals that
he wrote in later life. Lucy Landau, Paul’s bereaved partner, passes on this diary, in
which Paul had transcribed accounts of suicide by other writers, prefiguring his own
eventual death. Lucy comments that “it seemed to me [. . .] as if Paul had been
gathering evidence, the mounting weight of which, as his investigations proceeded,
finally convinced him that he belonged to the exiles and not to the people of S.” (58-9).
There is a clear parallel here with the narrator’s project of “gathering evidence” about
Paul (in the course of his enquiries, investigations, or reconnaissance), a parallel that
implies that he, too, feels that he “belong[s] to the exiles”. Indeed, the reader already
knows from the previous section of The Emigrants, “Henry Selwyn”, that the narrator
has lived at least some of his life in England, far from his Bavarian origins. Moreover,
the later sections, “Ambros Adelwarth” and “Max Ferber”, further strengthen the
narrator’s identification with the exiles whose stories he recovers and recounts, not least
through his strong criticism of Germany’s attitude towards its past that parallels the
disgust Paul feels for the bystanders of his home community. In this context, the
Sebaldian narrator’s comment that his short 19-kilometre journey from W to S. as a
young boy “seemed like a voyage halfway round the world” (29-30) is representative
not just of limited childish perception and emotional upheaval, but of a sensibility
which sees exile and emigration as central to the melancholic existence of both himself
and the group represented by Selwyn, Bereyter, Adelwarth and Ferber. In this way the
narrator appears to identify himself with his subjects to the extent that he becomes the
fifth emigrant (a point also made by Susanne Finke in her article “W. G. Sebald – Der
Fünfte Ausgewanderte”).
This strong personal connection, suggested by fond memories and shared emigrant
status, may suggest an unproblematized identification between the narrator and Paul
that contradicts his avowed determination to avoid “wrongful trespass”. However, other
elements of the story show that the relationship between narrator and subject is
characterized primarily by several layers of distance, at both the textual and metatextual level. Exemplary of this technique is the way Paul’s childhood memories are
rendered through several filters of memory. Paul’s father, “a man of refinement and
inclined to melancholy” (50), ran an “emporium” in the town of S. selling everything
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“from coffee to collar studs, camisoles to cuckoo clocks, candied sugar to collapsible
top hats” (51). Paul remembers how he travelled by tricycle around the shop in constant
wonderment, passing “through the ravines between tables, boxes and counters, amidst a
variety of smells” (51). Sebald relates these events through several layers of narration.
Paul remembers his childhood during convalescence from an eye operation, and
describes it to Lucy; Lucy remembers this conversation decades later, and tells it to the
narrator; the narrator, finally, relates Lucy’s account to us. Here multiple seams of
narration and time are interposed between the narrator and the subject (Paul’s
childhood), perhaps a common enough narrative technique. But this layering is
characteristic of the whole structure of Sebald’s art. If the subject of this story is seen
not just as an individual, “Paul Bereyter”, but also as the mid-twentieth century Europe
Bereyter’s story inhabits, we can begin to model the relationship between Sebald and
the victims of turbulent history. Sebald, through an act of writing, creates a narrative
persona who, through acts of listening and of imagination, relates to, and relates the
story of, “Paul Bereyter”. Thus the story is told at one remove. Paul, meanwhile,
though clearly shown as suffering at the hands of anti-Jewish laws, which prevent his
marriage to the non-Aryan Helen Hollaender and force his exile to France, is
nevertheless a somewhat indirect victim compared to those who were imprisoned and
murdered in concentration camps during the same period. By choosing to avoid direct
confrontation with the more obvious horrors of the Holocaust, Sebald adds another layer
of distance. Finally, the distance in time between the narrator and his wider subject is
foregrounded in the text through the thematization of memory throughout. Distance,
then, is embedded in the very structure of “Paul Bereyter”, as in much of Sebald’s
oeuvre, in which subjects are separated from the author by several narrative layers. This
serves as an exact counterbalance to the apparent identification implied by his
statements of close personal connection. Sebald’s technique, based around a particular
use of a narrative persona, thus combines simultaneously the elements of proximity and
distance necessary for an empathic approach to the victims of history.
A further aspect of this empathic persona is the way he listens to the individuals whose
lives he narrates. In “Paul Bereyter”, the only person with whom the narrator has a
direct conversation is Lucy Landau. Their exchanges, however, are not represented as
conventional question-and-answer dialogue:
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She lived at Yverdon, and it was there, on a summer’s day in the second year
after Paul died, a day I recall as curiously soundless, that I paid her the first of
several visits. She began by telling me that at the age of seven, together with her
father, who was an art historian and a widower, she had left her home town of
Frankfurt. (42)
Lucy, then, appears spontaneously to recount her story for the narrator; any questions he
may have asked are removed from the text. Moreover, the narrator implies that he holds
back from asking questions at all where possible. After Lucy recounts her early years,
and notes that Paul was the only person she ever met to compare with her childhood
friend Ernest, there is a paragraph break. Then: “A lengthy silence followed this
disclosure before Mme Landau added that she had been reading Nabokov’s
autobiography on a park bench” (43). During this “lengthy silence” there is no word of
sympathy or follow-up question. As Sebald told an interviewer: “I try to let people talk
for themselves” (Jaggi 6).
This resistance to the temptation to prompt may be compared with Lawrence Langer’s
exhortation that listeners to traumatic narratives must avoid asking leading questions
which merely reflect the interlocutor’s desire for uplift and redemption and deny the
truth of the speaker’s experience. In Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory
(1991), a meditation on the lessons to be learned from watching video interviews with
survivors, Langer notes that the questioners/listeners who are apparently facilitating the
testimony often fail to really “hear” the real story being told. They tend instead to urge
the former victim to acknowledge that they have somehow won through, that their spirit
has survived, and that their experience was not, after all, in vain:
Through the content of their questions, interviewers invite witnesses to give
detailed accounts of their feelings of joy when they realized that their ordeal was
over. We need to understand more about how this psychology of expectation
can impose itself on the reality of the situation and gradually forge a myth that
would displace the truth. (157)
This truth, for Langer, is one of an irrevocably “diminished self” whose experience is
not a teleological movement from suffering to liberation to recovery but a “parallel”
ontology in which the past life of the camps is ever-present. For Langer, “the cherished
voices of continuity, adaptation, and renewal speak with the authority of their absence,
immersing us in a world whose inhabitants remain adrift even as they clamber ashore”
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(37). “The challenge is to enter this world to reverse the process of defamiliarization
that overwhelmed the victims and to find an orientation that will do justice to their
recaptured experience without summoning it or them to judgment and evaluation”
(183). We need to “enter the realm of unreconciled understanding, where events remain
permanently unredeemed and unredeemable” (200).
An interviewer’s questioning of a Holocaust survivor and a friend’s gentle approach to a
bereaved woman may seem at first sight to have little in common. But there is in
Sebald’s approach to his subjects a certain affinity with Langer’s position. Paul
Bereyter commits suicide decades after the worst events of his life, suggesting that he
was never able to move on from them (and calling to mind other belated suicides like
Jean Améry, Paul Celan, and Primo Levi). Sebald, like Langer, implies that healing and
redemption are not relevant concepts for those who lived through World War II in
Europe. Paul inhabits the same realm as Langer’s “former victims” in that he carries his
experience with him as ever-present (as a “parallel” self), and he gleans nothing
positive, heroic or redemptive from his survival, instead succumbing to bouts of
depression that culminate in bleak suicide on a railway track. Indeed, Paul may be
described as a Langerian “diminished self”. Remembering the odd way Paul talked in
the classroom, the narrator describes his former teacher as follows:
In well-structured sentences, he spoke without any touch of dialect but with a
slight impediment of speech or timbre, as if the sound were coming not from the
larynx but from somewhere near the heart. This sometimes gave one the feeling
that it was all being powered by clockwork inside him and Paul in his entirety
was a mechanical human made of tin and other metal parts, and might be put out
of operation for ever by the smallest functional hitch. (34-5)
Paul, then, is permanently damaged by his experience. Sebald’s narrator’s avoidance of
leading questions when talking to Paul’s bereaved partner is just one element of an
exemplary absence of, in Langer’s terms, inappropriate “judgement” or “evaluation”.
The “investigations” instigated by the narrator do not produce any results or conclusions
as such. At the end of the story an opportunity to comment on Paul’s decision to
commit suicide is evaded. The narrative ends with Lucy’s dispassionate account, with
no further intervention from the narrator. His determination to avoid “wrongful
trespass” is successfully achieved by allowing Paul’s and Lucy’s stories to speak for
themselves, despite having known Paul personally, which could have led to speculation
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or even conclusions as to Paul’s inner thoughts. For Sebald, these are forever unknown
to us. As Lucy Landau tells the narrator, “in the end it is hard to know what it is that
someone dies of. Yes, it is very hard, said Mme Landau, one really doesn’t know” (612).
It therefore seems strange that the critic Marianna Torgovnick should detect in Sebald’s
work “a pervasive identification with the dead” (126), calling him “the master of
lability, of intimate identification with the fate of others” (129). Though it is tempting
to reject this claim in the light of the analysis above, which shows that Sebald’s method
consists not of simple identification but an empathic approach that includes it,
Torgovnick’s phrase may be useful if the notion of “lability” is separated from “intimate
identification”. While Sebald is not merely identifying with the dead, there are
nevertheless moments of slippage that deserve attention. The extent to which the other
can ever really be understood is problematized by “labile” sections which occur
precisely where comprehension breaks down.
In the middle of “Paul Bereyter”, the narrator briefly discusses Paul’s time spent serving
in the German army, which is the period he was “least able to understand in Paul’s
story” (55). Listing Paul’s various stations in Europe, the narrator evasively comments
that “doubtless [he] saw more than any heart or eye can bear” (56). Thus far the
possibility of understanding is wholly rejected by maintaining strict distance. However,
the conclusion of this passage represents a brief fracture, a moment of lability in which
the narrator’s voice mingles with that of Paul. A photograph of Bereyter in sunglasses
appears alongside the following text:
[. . .] always, as Paul wrote under this photograph, one was, as the crow flies,
about 2,000 km away – but from where? – and day by day, hour by hour, with
every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one’s qualities, became less
comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract. (56)
Here the voice of the narrator is conflated with that of Paul. Working against the
determining phrase “as Paul wrote” are the lack of speech marks, the use of the formal
pronoun “one” (which seems to universalize the experience), and the sudden emotional
impact of “but from where?” (here a voice breaks in: the narrator’s? Paul’s?) The
moment of slippage, though brief, is enough to destabilize the surrounding narration
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which consists of the narrator’s report of his conversation with Lucy Landau. Both Paul
and the narrator, it seems, have become “less comprehensible to [themselves]”. Such
subtle moments of lability in the context of otherwise stable objectivity do not
contradict but rather reinforce the process of empathy that operates in the area between
distance and proximity, understanding and identification.
Identity slippage is a recurring theme in Sebald’s narratives, happening in relation to the
living as well as the dead. In Rings of Saturn, the narrator recounts a “strange feeling”
(183), a combination of identification and déjà vu, experienced during a visit to his
friend Michael Hamburger. Hamburger, like Sebald’s narrator, was a German émigré
writer living in East Anglia, though he moved to England much earlier, in 1933, at the
age of nine. Once again, Sebald’s narrator is perhaps “gathering evidence” about the
“exiles” with whom he feels an affinity. Hamburger’s shadowy memories of childhood
in Berlin are recounted by the narrator in paraphrase from Hamburger’s published
memoirs. Then we learn of Hamburger’s current thoughts about the meaning of his life,
recounted to the narrator in the garden, in which Hamburger ponders his links to one of
the German writers he has translated, the lyric poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843).
Their birthdates, for example, are just two days apart, and the water pump in
Hamburger’s garden has the same year written on it as that of Hölderlin’s birth. These
links amount not just to coincidences but also Hamburger’s sense that his personality
has taken on aspects of the earlier writer. Hamburger wonders: “Across what distances
in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one
perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, one’s precursor?” (182)
Hamburger’s existential conundrum is itself a precursor of the narrator’s odd experience
that follows, and indeed it is not clear (partly due to Sebald’s avoidance of speech
marks) whether Hamburger, the narrator, or both, are articulating these questions. The
narrator says that
why it was that on my first visit to Michael’s house I instantly felt as if I lived or
had once lived there, in every respect precisely as he does, I cannot explain. All
I know is that I stood spellbound in his high-ceilinged studio room with its
north-facing windows in front of the heavy mahogany bureau at which Michael
said he no longer worked because the room was so cold, even in midsummer;
and that, while we talked of the difficulty of heating old houses, a strange
feeling came upon me, as if it were not he who had abandoned that place of
work but I, as if the spectacles cases, letters and writing materials that had
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evidently lain untouched for months in the soft north light had once been my
spectacles cases, my letters and my writing materials. (183)
Continuing through the house, noting his feelings affinity of with other objects scattered
around, the narrator has the same feeling of being one’s own precursor that Hamburger
had reported: “the quite outlandish thought crossed my mind that these things, the
kindling, the jiffy bags, the fruit preserves, the seashells and the sound of the sea within
them had all outlasted me, and that Michael was taking me round a house in which I
myself had lived a long time ago” (184-5).
There are different ways in which to interpret this ambiguous experience. It could be
described as normal déjà vu enriched by a sense of connection to others that collapses
time. It could also be seen as a way of identifying with one’s antecedents or even a kind
of reincarnation, thereby claiming a connection to the past. More problematically,
Hamburger could be seen to over-identify with Hölderlin, and the narrator with
Hamburger, in gestures of appropriation of the other’s life and memory.
However, despite this suggestion, this episode does not undermine Sebald’s ethics of
representation, nor does it disrupt the empathic balance between “enquiries” and “brief
emotional moments” held so carefully in “Paul Bereyter”. Hamburger is still living, is
known well to the narrator, and did not suffer directly under the Nazi regime, all things
which separate him from Bereyter. Sebald suggests that moments of identification with
those such as Hamburger are not subject to the same intense scruples as with victims of
the Holocaust.
This distinction is made clearer in Sebald’s final prose narrative, Austerlitz. An early
episode from this book reinforces the carefully delineated ethical stance which rejects
the possibility of imagining others’ suffering. The narrator describes his visit, in 1967,
to the historic fortress of Breendonk in Belgium, which was used by the German
occupying forces during World War II as an internment camp. Initially it appears to
him as “a low-built concrete mass, rounded at all its outer edges and giving the
gruesome impression of something hunched and misshapen” (25). Walking through the
grounds, he passes through an area where, he tells us, prisoners were forced to move
overwhelmingly large quantities of earth using crude wheelbarrows. While he initially
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seems to be feeling sympathy for their plight, close analysis of his response reveals
something more complicated:
I could not imagine how the prisoners, very few of whom had probably ever
done hard physical labour before their arrest and internment, could have pushed
these barrows full of heavy detritus over the sun-baked clay of the ground,
furrowed by ruts as hard as stone, or through the mire that was churned up after
a single day’s rain; it was impossible to picture them bracing themselves against
the weight until their hearts nearly burst, or think of the overseer beating them
about the head with the handle of a shovel when they could not move forward.
(28-9)
An odd contradiction is in evidence here. The reader’s sympathy is apparently elicited:
the ground is “hard as stone”; the prisoners’ “hearts nearly burst” with effort; they are
even “beat[en] about the head”. Yet simultaneously the narrator insists on his distance
from the victims: he “could not imagine” their labour, which is, moreover, “impossible
to picture” or even “think of”. Thus while the scene is “pictured” for the reader in
prose, the narrator paradoxically asserts his determination not to imagine it and thereby
risk identification with the prisoners. Thus far, the process is similar to the narrator of
“Paul Bereyter”s rejection of attempts to imagine the life and death of his former
teacher. But this time the ethical point is extended to show that it is the fact that the
victims are unknown and unknowable that makes identification with them
impermissible. The next section of the narrative makes this clear:
However, if I could not envisage the drudgery performed day after day, year
after year, at Breendonk and all the other main and branch camps, when I finally
entered the fort itself and glanced through the glass panes of a door on the right
into the so-called mess of the SS guards with its scrubbed tables and benches, its
bulging stove and the various adages neatly painted on its wall in Gothic
lettering, I could well imagine the sight of the good fathers and dutiful sons from
Vilsbiburg and Fuhlsbüttel, from the Black Forest and the Bavarian Alps, sitting
here when they came off duty to play cards or write letters to their loved ones at
home. After all, I had lived among them until my twentieth year. (29, emphasis
mine)
In making this distinction between unknown victims, of whom he has no direct
experience, and the Germans running the camp, a cultural group he knows from
childhood, the narrator sets out an ethics of representation in which what is beyond
one’s own experience is not to be explicitly imagined. While the description of the
working prisoners contains some emotive and descriptive material, it stops short of the
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common fictional trope of trying imaginatively to enter the mind of an individual
victim, and, moreover, explicitly asserts that this strategy would be wrong.
Instead Sebald’s narrator takes what may be called an allusive stance in this passage,
with reference to the historian Saul Friedländer’s attempt to define what might
constitute “adequacy” in writing about the Holocaust. After citing Ida Fink’s short
stories and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah as positive instances, Friedländer offers some
suggestions:
A common denominator appears: the exclusion of straight, documentary realism,
but the use of some sort of allusive or distanced realism. Reality is there, in its
starkness, but perceived through a filter: that of memory (distance in time), that
of spatial displacement, that of some sort of narrative margin which leaves the
unsayable unsaid. (“Introduction” 17)
One way that Sebald’s “allusive realism” establishes a “narrative margin” is through the
description of objects. As he wanders through the interior of Breendonk, the narrator
obliquely addresses the issue of vanished, unrecorded memories:
I think of how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing
into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining
itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have
no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on. Histories, for
instance, like those of the straw mattresses which lay, shadow-like, on the
stacked plank beds and which had become thinner and shorter because the chaff
in them disintegrated over the years, shrunken – and now, in writing this, I do
remember that such an idea occurred to me at the time – as if they were the
mortal frames of those who once lay there in the darkness. (31)
The “filter” of memory, to use Friedländer’s terms, here enables the act of “allusive
realism”. Where a reader might expect an emotional reaction to the evidence of human
suffering and misery in this dungeon-like place, the narrator instead reaches for
philosophical abstraction, pondering on the possibility of inanimate objects owning
“memory”, while only fleetingly mentioning the “mortal frames” of the unknown
victims. Once again this strategy maintains a decorous distance that “leaves the
unsayable unsaid” by only alluding to the lost memories of victims rather than trying to
imagine what these memories might have been.
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This allusive strategy may also be described as a repetitive process of approaching the
subject and turning away. On entering a casemate with an iron hook hanging from the
ceiling, suggestive of torture, the narrator reports feeling unwell. However, he insists
that this is not due to imagining what might have happened there: “It was not that as the
nausea rose in me I guessed at the kind of third-degree interrogations which were being
conducted here around the time I was born” (33). Instead the narrator turns away from
speculation in favour of written accounts by actual survivors. First he describes the
torture suffered by Jean Améry at this same fortress. Améry described this in At the
Mind’s Limits (1966), and Sebald paraphrases his account, noting how he “was hoisted
aloft by his hands, tied behind his back, so that with a crack and splintering sound [. . .]
his arms dislocated from the sockets in his shoulder joints, and he was left dangling”
(34). Rather than try to further describe Améry’s suffering, the narrator turns away
again to describe the fate of another survivor. Here Sebald’s habit of associative
thought begins to take on a threatening quality, as every attempt to shy away from
horror simply leads back to more. The narrator gives a dispassionate, factual account,
abstracted from Claude Simon’s Le Jardin des Plantes (1997), of how one Gostone
Novelli immigrated to South America after suffering the same mode of torture as
Améry. In the new continent, Novelli analysed the language of a primitive tribe, which
consisted “almost entirely of vowels, particularly the sound A in countless variations of
tone and emphasis” (35). On returning home and becoming an artist, Novelli used
clusters of this letter A in his paintings, which to the narrator resemble “a long-drawnout scream”, illustrated in the text as follows:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAA (36)
Thus Sebald finds a way of indirectly addressing the suffering of Holocaust victims
without actually describing it. Through an account of a visit to one of the more
peripheral sites of Holocaust history, Sebald shows his empathic narrative persona
wrestling with the impossibility of imagining others’ suffering and pondering the
meaning of the traces that remain, whether they be straw mattresses or survivor
accounts. However, no facile closure, conclusions, or judgement are offered; the
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Breendonk episode ends abruptly with the drawn-out scream, and the narrative moves
directly on to the narrator’s second encounter with Austerlitz.
The relationship between the Sebaldian persona and Jacques Austerlitz, Kindertransport
survivor and architectural historian, offers further evidence of the empathic nature of
this text. LaCapra describes empathy as “an affective relation, rapport, or bond with the
other recognized and respected as other” (Writing 212-3). The central relationship in
Austerlitz dramatizes this empathic bond in exemplary fashion; the narrator befriends
and supports but maintains a respectful distance, never questioning, intruding or
speculating. Instead, what the narrator does, over the decades of chance and arranged
meetings with the troubled protagonist, is listen. At each encounter, the narrator briefly
describes how he came to be with Austerlitz, before allowing the latter’s story to take
over, punctuated by the phrase “said Austerlitz” only where grammatically necessary.
Austerlitz, who was removed from his motherland and mother tongue as an infant, who
grew up with disturbed foster-parents, and who only late in life is beginning to
investigate his origins and the part played by Nazism in his family history, may be seen
as a traumatized “survivor” who bears witness through testimony. In this light, the
narrator could be construed as what Dori Laub calls an “empathic listener” (68). In his
chapter “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening” (1992), Laub presents
himself as at once Holocaust survivor, psychoanalyst specializing in trauma, and cofounder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, for which
he also acts as an interviewer. Regarding this latter role, he argues that not only is his
presence essential for the enablement of testimony, but that it can also enact a measure
of healing in the traumatized survivor. This is clear from his conflation of his two roles
of psychoanalyst and listener. Discussing the first, he says that “a therapeutic process –
a process of constructing a narrative, of reconstructing a history and essentially or reexternalizating the event – has to be set in motion” (69). Moving on to the second, the
testimonial process, he explicitly links it with the therapeutic situation: “I find the
process that is set in motion by psychoanalytic practice and by the testimony to be
essentially the same, both in the narrator and in myself as listener (analyst or
interviewer)” (70). Thus, by implication, “empathic listening” to the testimony of
Holocaust survivors can “set in motion” the same therapeutic process aspired to in
relation to psychiatric patients. Moreover, in this model, healing is enabled in an
extremely passive manner; the listener merely has to listen, to be the site of “re-
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externalization” to which the survivor can “articulate and transmit the story” (69). The
empathic listener is an “addressable other, an other who can hear the anguish of one’s
memories and thus affirm and recognize their realness” (68, all emphases in original).
Laub’s use of the pronoun “one” is revealing here. As a survivor himself, it is perhaps
he who is seeking “healing” through this process along with his patients. Yet his
interviewees do not necessarily want to be healed as such. As Langer argues, the
survivors interviewed for the Fortunoff Archive are not equivalent to those seeking
psychiatric help; they do not demand to be healed, simply heard. Laub’s use of
“empathy” here is non-LaCaprian as it fails to allow the other to retain his or her
otherness; transference and healing are intrinsic components of his schema. As such it
differs from Sebald’s listening narrator in Austerlitz who offers no explicit discourse of
healing, merely recording the story of his protagonist.
And yet there are quasi-therapeutic elements to Austerlitz at the level of narrative
structure which may be revealed through further analysis of LaCaprian empathy.
LaCapra seeks to activate the term in order to achieve more useful or productive ways
of representing the traumatic past. He argues that Holocaust writing, for example, can
draw on empathy to create “a discursive analogue of mourning as a mode of working
through a relation to historical losses” (Writing 213). LaCapra labels this mode
“empathic unsettlement”, in which the position of the writer is self-reflexively utilized,
explored and expressed. Suggesting how this might be achieved, LaCapra describes
narrative in terms of movement:
Empathic unsettlement also raises in pointed form the problem of how to
address traumatic events involving victimization, including the problem of
composing narratives that neither confuse one’s own voice or position with the
victim’s nor seek facile uplift, harmonization, or closure but allow the
unsettlement that they address to affect the narrative’s own movement in terms
of both acting out and working through. (Writing 78)
LaCapra is drawing on Freudian psychoanalytic terminology for his analogy. In
“Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” (1914), Freud describes a certain
kind of neurotic patient who “does not remember anything at all of what he has
forgotten and repressed, but rather acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory, but as
an action; he repeats it, without being aware that he is repeating it” (36). Therapy
enables the patient to “work through” the resistance that is causing this repetition, and
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properly to remember and accept the (often traumatic) past event. Acting out is
unconscious and involuntary, while working through is a process of deliberate
remembrance. Sebald’s narrator in Austerlitz moves from one state to the other. The
book opens as follows: “In the second half of the 1960s I travelled repeatedly from
England to Belgium, partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were
never entirely clear to me” (1). This unconscious repetition “affect[s] the narrative’s
own movement” in that it leads to the narrator’s first meeting with Austerlitz. Indeed,
the narrator moves between places and events with little apparent volition, as in the
wanderings around Europe described in Vertigo. However, the end of Austerlitz shows
the narrator “working through” his “unsettlement” by revisiting Breendonk thirty years
after his first experience. No “uplift, harmonization, or closure” is attempted here,
though there is a small hint of historical progress: “The fortifications lay unchanged on
the blue-green island, but the number of visitors had increased” (411). Along with this
evidence of wider public interest in the past, the narrator summarizes Dan Jacobson’s
family memoir, Heshel’s Kingdom (1998). By reading this book on the grassy bank
near the fort the narrator is engaging in a deliberate, conscious, participatory act of
remembrance. The details given from this book also serve as a countermeasure to any
“uplift” created by the progress Austerlitz makes towards tracing his father’s history and
reconciling himself with his lost lover, Marie de Verneuil. Jacobson’s memoir reminds
the reader of the factual losses of the Holocaust, in this case those at Kaunas in
Lithuania, where “more than thirty thousand people were killed” (Austerlitz 415).
Across the narrative time of Austerlitz, then, the Sebaldian persona has moved from
acting-out to working-through, in a process analogous to LaCapra’s “empathic
unsettlement”. Moreover, through the active visiting of memorial sites, which along
with Breendonk include Terezin and a Jewish cemetery, Sebald’s narrator also fulfils
the requirements of what Andreas Huyssen has called “mimetic approximation”. On the
question of how present generations can mourn the Holocaust in what he labels our
“museal” (11) culture, Huyssen writes:
No matter how fractured by media, geography, or subject position
representations of the Holocaust are, ultimately, it all comes back to this core:
unimaginable, unspeakable, and unrepresentable horror. Post-Holocaust
generations, it seems to me, can only approach that core by what I would call
mimetic approximation, a mnemonic strategy which recognizes the event in its
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otherness and beyond identification or therapeutic empathy but which physically
relieves some of the horror and the pain in the slow and persistent labor of
remembrance. (“Monument” 16)
Sebald may be said to participate in this “physical” remembrance in a virtual fashion
through his empathic narrative persona, who persistently wanders the memorial sites of
Europe while avoiding over-identification with victims. Whether this “relieves some of
the horror and the pain” is debatable; Huyssen’s formula is motivated by his desire for
positive patterns of mourning as an “antidote to the freezing of memory” (15), and it is
not clear that Sebald would accede to this aim. Nevertheless Sebald’s strategy is
broadly similar to Huyssen’s exhortation that we should put the myriad representations
of memory in contemporary culture to some use.
Another suggestion as to how later generations should deal with the horrors of the past
is provided by the philosopher Gillian Rose. Rose criticizes the prevalence in both
academic and popular culture of what she calls “Holocaust piety”. This results from the
belief that the Holocaust is “ineffable” and therefore inherently unrepresentable. For
Rose, this philosophical view works “to mystify something we dare not understand” (43,
emphasis in original). Rose wants to expose what she sees as the painful truth of
humanity’s implicit collusion with evil, which can become concealed by simplistic
divisions between victims and perpetrators. This truth is to be reached through a new
ethics of representation that combines “the fascism of representation” with the
“representation of Fascism”. Rose analyses two films, Schindler’s List and The
Remains of the Day (while also making some reference to the books on which they are
based). She argues that a “crisis of identity” (46) could and should have been produced
in Spielberg’s film, by bringing out the implicit parallels between the Nazi commandant
Goeth and the Jews’ saviour Schindler. Instead the film fails, leaving us “at the
beginning of the day” (48, emphasis in original), in the safe position of the “ultimate
predator” (47) who watches sentimentally from a distance. It misses the opportunity of
leaving us, instead, “unsafe, but with the remains of the day. To have that experience,
we would have to discover and confront our own fascism” (48, emphasis in original).
For Rose, this experience is achieved in The Remains of the Day, which dramatises,
through the character of the butler Stevens, “the contradiction of the ethic of service”
(51). Stevens is motivated by a desire to serve a Lord for whom he has moral
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admiration, yet knows that once he has made his choice, he must show unquestioning
loyalty – and in this case, the Lord is a key mobilizer of British inter-war appeasement
of Hitler. Rose points out that Stevens’ situation is akin to joining a fascist
“corporation” such as German Nazism, which in turn has parallels with the “great
house” of English aristocracy. On joining a fascist organisation, one makes an initial
free choice of allegiance, but then loses freedom by renouncing the right to criticize.
Rose concludes:
This film dramatises the link between emotional and political collusion.
Without sentimental voyeurism, it induces a crisis of identification in the viewer,
who is brought up flat against equally the representation of Fascism, the
honourable tradition which could not recognise the evils of Nazism, and the
corporate order of the great house, and the fascism of representation, a political
culture which we identify as our own, and hence an emotional economy which
we cannot project and disown. (53-4, emphasis in original)
Rose, then, describes a “crisis of identification”, in which the viewer is forced to
identify with the butler’s dilemma of loyalty. In Austerlitz, a comparable moment is the
identification a reader could make with the protagonist’s profound ignorance of the
Holocaust. After he belatedly recovers his memory, Austerlitz explains how he had
achieved this evasion:
Inconceivable as it seems to me today, I knew nothing about the conquest of
Europe by the Germans and the slave state they set up, and nothing about the
persecution I escaped, or at least, what I did know was not much more than a
salesgirl in a shop, for instance, knows about the plague or cholera. As far as I
was concerned the world ended in the late nineteenth century. [. . .] I did not
read newspapers because, as I now know, I feared unwelcome revelations, I
turned on the radio only at certain hours of the day, I was always refining my
defensive reactions, creating a kind of quarantine or immune system which, as I
maintained my existence in a smaller and smaller space, protected me from
anything that could be connected in any way, however distant, with my own
early history. (197-8)
Austerlitz’s discovery of his past, including his mother’s internment, transport and
death, leads the reader, alongside the narrator, to a fresh appraisal of the camp at
Theresiendstadt where his mother was held. The Roseian crisis of identification lies in
the connection between Austerlitz’s “avoidance system” (278) and that of the reader,
who is forced (through the fascism of representation) to rediscover the Holocaust (the
representation of Fascism) along with the protagonist. My analysis here depends on an
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assumption that the reader, while not being as ignorant as Austerlitz, nevertheless needs
to be reminded of a subject all too easily avoided, perhaps because he or she “fear[s]
unwelcome revelations”. The reader is forced to confront his or her attitudes to and
knowledge of the Holocaust and to consider whether they have been adequate. Thus
Sebald’s novel takes on a kind of moral purpose, a strategy of raising consciousness, of
contributing to continuing remembrance by implicating the reader in society’s supposed
problems of avoidance and denial.
However, this reading reduces Sebald’s achievement to the status of socio-political
tract, or at least to Genette’s “ideological function” which I earlier discounted. Moving
far beyond such strategies, Austerlitz reminds us that straightforward representation is
no longer enough, and that forms must be adapted and even distorted in order to make
the subject meaningful once more in a cultural climate that is so “fractured and
sedimented” (Huyssen, “Monument” 13). For example, at the moment of the reader’s
closest potential identification with Austerlitz – the search for an image of his lost
mother – visual form is portrayed as being expressly manipulable and inconclusive.
Austerlitz obtains a copy of a propaganda film made at the Theresiendstadt ghetto
where his mother was held. This film purports to show a civilized and happy life being
lived by the Jewish inhabitants. Austerlitz, in an effort to find his mother’s face, has a
“slow-motion copy” made, which “reveal[s] previously hidden objects and people,
creating, by default as it were, a different sort of film altogether”. This slowing-down
changes the appearance of the inhabitants from being “cheerful” and “apparently in
perfect contentment” to people “toiling in their sleep”, weary, and apparently “hovering
rather than walking”, reminiscent to the narrator of “blurred” and “dissolved” ghostly
images. Meanwhile even the sound on the slowed-down version is different, with the
music changing from “merry polka” to “funeral march”, and the “high-pitched,
strenuous tones” of the voice-over becoming a “menacing growl” that reminds the
narrator of caged beasts “driven out of their minds in captivity” (344-50). Thus
Austerlitz’s manipulation of the film reveals the truth of the situation in
Theresiendstadt, which is one of imprisoned slave labourers in appalling conditions,
who will soon be sent East, murdered, and “dissolved” from history. Moreover, once
again Sebald’s use of fact and fiction in the same moment contributes to the effect of
crisis and unsettlement. If Austerlitz’s mother is imaginary, who are the faces in the
stills apparently reproduced from the propaganda film, which appear on the page of
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Sebald’s text? Over-identification with the protagonist’s mourning for a mother he
never knew is impossible in such a position of uncertainty. In Rose’s terms, we avoid
“Holocaust piety” by emerging from the scene not with “sentimental tears”, but with
“the dry eyes of a deep grief” (54).
Both the problematisation of representation implicit in the Theresiendstadt episode of
Austerlitz, and the creation of an empathic narrative persona, point to the essential selfreflexivity of Sebald’s technique. As such, a parallel might be drawn with Linda
Hutcheon’s category of “historiographic metafiction”, which is “obsessed with the
question of how we can come to know the past today” (44), and in which “[n]arrative
representation – fictive and historical – comes under [. . .] scrutiny” (14). For
Hutcheon, this is inextricably linked to the postmodern, the moment “where
documentary historical actuality meets formalist self-reflexivity and parody” (7).
Though the novel form has always been both fictional and worldly, “postmodern
historiographic metafiction merely foregrounds this inherent paradox by having its
historical and socio-political grounding sit uneasily alongside its self-reflexivity” (14).
However, Hutcheon’s insistence on the postmodern nature of her category makes it
problematic to apply to Sebald, a writer whose style and content are both steeped in the
past. A more productive way to assess Sebald’s self-reflexivity is offered by Anne
Fuchs in her monograph ‘Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte’. Zur Poetik der
Erinnerung in W.G. Sebalds Prosa (2004). Fuchs situates Sebald in the context of
theories of cultural memory. Sebald’s position, she explains, has been formed through
experiencing the aftermath of the war (personal memory), hearing or noticing the
absence of parental accounts of that war (community memory), and later engaging with
issues of German collective memory (cultural memory). Fuchs argues that the way to
deal with the conflicts inherent in these memory definitions is to be methodologically
self-reflexive. J. J. Long summarizes Fuchs’ analysis as follows:
An ethical mode of historical writing, she argues, needs to reconstruct the past in
a way that thematizes the ideological and affective determinants of such a
reconstruction. This in turn produces certain writing effects that lead to a
‘virtual empathy’ in which the difference between self and other is made
transparent. (“Book Review” 102)
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Thus we return to the question of empathy, which as I have argued is at the heart of
Sebald’s narrative persona. Fuchs is using the same nuanced version of this term
articulated by LaCapra and which results from Sebald’s simultaneous gesture of
proximity and distance. Other critics, however, have construed the empathic dimension
of Sebald’s work differently. Mark McCulloh detects a theme of “democratized
empathy” in which the suffering of all nature has equal value, because, in Sebald’s
world, “everything is part of the same monism”:
Essential to this monism is the premise that everything has its rightful place and
is worthy of attention, especially those things or beings that are neglected,
forgotten, or nearly lost. [. . .]. Thus, according to the logic of democratized
empathy, even the traumatization of a mere moth or butterfly is to be regarded as
true suffering. (“Stylistics” 39-40).
Surprisingly, McCulloh does not take up the implications of this for Sebald’s portrayal
of the Holocaust and its victims. Indeed, McCulloh is more interested in the natural and
holistic elements of Sebald’s work. Meanwhile, Jan Ceuppens calls the Sebaldian
narrator’s vow to avoid “wrongful trespass” a “Bilderverbot [pictures ban]”, a
“prohibition against picturing or imagining another person all too vividly” that results in
an opposition between “a cool and distanced approach [and] an empathic one” (253).
But in the terms set out in the present study, empathy can contain a “cool and distanced
approach”, rather than necessarily being in opposition to it. Finally, J. J. Long argues
that The Emigrants is situated
between the extreme positions of an uncritical empathy on the one hand and a
pseudo-objective empiricism on the other. This positioning “in-between” allows
[Sebald] to offer models of intercultural and, indeed, intersubjective narrative
that work against appropriation not by avoiding it [. . .] but by thematizing it in a
self-reflexive manner. (“Intercultural Identities” 526)
Again, this “in-between” position is not somewhere between “uncritical empathy” and
“pseudo-objective empiricism” but is LaCaprian empathy in the terms set out in the
present study. Transgenerational empathy is at once identification and objectivity.
This, along with the element of self-reflexivity identified by Fuchs and Long, is crucial
to Sebald’s empathic narrative persona, a figure who, throughout his narratives, treads a
delicate path between memory and history in a simultaneous gesture of proximity and
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distance. The next chapter deals with a novel very different in style that nevertheless
achieves similar goals.
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Chapter 5
“An act of replacement”: duality, post-postmemory and absence in Jonathan
Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated
In the previous chapter I considered transgenerational empathy through the example of
W. G. Sebald’s narrative persona, a figure one generation removed from the Holocaust
yet nevertheless connected to the events by geographical and personal ties. This chapter
will explore the extent to which other narratives, whose authors, personae and
characters have greater generational and spatial distance than those of Sebald, may still
achieve an empathic relation to the past. My main focus is on Jonathan Safran Foer’s
Everything is Illuminated (2002), which deals with the relationship between present and
past through the theme of grandfathers and grandchildren. In this novel, two young
men, one Jewish American, one Ukrainian, search for the truth about their grandfathers,
both of whom were directly affected by the Holocaust. Such quests may be held to
symbolize society’s continuing desire to unearth secrets from the traumatic past and to
evaluate their effect on our lives in the present. In an essay published in 2001, the
historian Saul Friedländer offers a psychoanalytic view of this process of discovery:
The ‘generation of the grandchildren’, mainly among Europeans (Germans in
particular) but among Jews as well, has sufficient distance from the events in
terms of both the sheer passage of time and the lack of personal involvement to
be able to confront the full impact of the past. Thus, the expansion of memory
of the Shoah could be interpreted as the gradual lifting, induced by the passage
of time, of collective repression. (“History” 274)
However, this confrontation with the past will lead to revelations and reorientations. A
“lack of personal involvement” does not mean that the impact is necessarily lessened,
particularly when distant familial connections haunt present generations. Germans,
Jews and others continue to confront the facts of their ancestors’ involvement and the
implications for their own sense of identity. Although the effect of this may eventually
decrease as the decades and centuries pass, for now the corrosive effect of past evil on
present consciousness remains pervasive.
Literary narratives are beginning to emerge that address this situation by moving
beyond the “second generation”, the children of survivors, to the third and even fourth
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generations after the event. Nancy Huston’s novel Fault Lines (2007) explores the
effect of the less well known Nazi policy of “Germanisation” on its victims and their
descendants. In an “Author’s Note”, Huston explains how children with an “Aryan”
appearance from occupied countries such as Ukraine and Poland were taken from their
parents and sent to Lebensborn (Fountain of Life) centres, and from there to approved
adoptive parents, to grow up as Germans and replenish a population decimated by the
Nazis’ empire-building wars. Huston’s novel addresses this topic through an unusual
structure, consisting of four sections, each narrated by a different six-year-old child in a
different time: Sol, 2004; Randall, 1982; Sadie, 1962; and Kristina, 1944-45. Each
narrator is the child of the next, meaning that Randall, Sadie and Kristina are Sol’s
father, grandmother and great-grandmother respectively. The reverse order of these
narratives means that the explanation for each character’s emotional difficulties is
mysterious and revelatory. A version of the story told in normal chronological order
would go something like this: Kristina has been taken from her Ukrainian parents and
raised as an Aryan. After the war her original parents cannot be found, so she is sent to
a family with Ukrainian heritage in Toronto. This has repercussions for the next three
generations. Her daughter Sadie witnesses Kristina’s violent sex with another
Lebensborn survivor. Sadie grows up obsessed with the Holocaust and moves with her
family to Israel in order to research it, making a lasting impression on her son, Randall.
Randall’s son Solomon, meanwhile, is the most obviously mentally disturbed, believing
himself to have godlike powers and indulging in psychosexual fantasies relating to the
current Middle Eastern conflict and Gulf War. At the beginning of the novel (and the
end of the chronological story), Kristina is persuaded into a reunion with her adoptive
sister from her days as a German child. The two old women fight over a doll that one
had promised the other, in a climactic moment placed early in the narrative that initially
appears comedic but gains tragic resonance as the deep wounds imparted by the Nazi
policy are revealed. Thus the Nazi project of removing children from their families
echoes down the “fault lines” of generations, not only in the emotions and imagination
of descendants but also in the unreconciled hatred between “pure” Germans and their
fellow Europeans.
Huston shows how identities can become irrevocably damaged by family upheaval. For
example, Sadie, on discovering at age six that her mother had a German background,
uses this to explain, through her inner demon, why she has been unhappy and confused:
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“Now you know where the evil comes from, says my Fiend, you’ve been living a lie
since the day you were born” (229, emphasis in original). A similar interior voice (also
shown through italicization) afflicts “Micha” in Rachel Seiffert’s novel The Dark Room
(2001). The German grandchild of a Waffen SS soldier, Micha obsessively researches
the Holocaust while chiding himself as to his motivation: “Stupid to feel guilty about
things that were done before I was born” (247); “Even when I cry about it, I’m crying
for myself. Not for the people who were killed” (377). Like Sadie, he realises that
important secrets have been withheld, and insists on finding them out for himself, in a
quest which alienates his loved ones and strains his relationships. Micha has a habit of
rehearsing to himself his family connections; “In queues, on trains, in idle moments, he
will lay them out in his head; layers of time and geography” (221). He remembers his
“Opa”, Askan Boell, who died when Micha was a child, as kind, attentive, and a gifted
artist. However, Boell is also known to have served in the Waffen SS in Belarus before
being captured by the Russians and interned for nine years after the war. Micha cannot
reconcile his personal memories with the possibility that his grandfather was a
perpetrator of atrocities, and travels to Belarus to look for the truth. In the area in which
his grandfather served, the local museum’s photographs of Nazis massacring Jews do
not show Boell’s face. However, Micha finds an old man who lived through that
period, Jozef Kolesnik. Kolesnik confirms Micha’s fears, saying that he remembers the
few who refused to participate in the killings, and that Boell was not one of them.
Though Kolesnik’s recollections are tainted with his own dubious past, Micha, adding
them to the accumulation of evidence produced by his researches, is fully convinced:
Where is my proof? I have no reason not to believe it. There are no pictures of
him holding a gun to someone’s head, but I am sure that he did that, and pulled
the trigger, too. The camera was pointing elsewhere, shutter opening and
closing on another murder of another Jew, done by another man. But my Opa
was no more than a few paces away. (370-1, emphasis in original)
Micha’s respectable German family do not share his conviction, or are fearful of
confronting it. His sister tries to suggest that the discovery of Boell’s secret should not
change his status as loved grandparent:
People do terrible things. It was war. I’m not excusing it. Not at all. But it was
war and it was cruel and confusing and he couldn’t tell right from wrong any
more, and he did something terrible. [. . .] I don’t really know, of course, but
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maybe sometimes they believe in these things, or they become them, or maybe
sometimes they don’t. They just do them and then they go on. (373-4)
Such expressions of moral ambiguity have led some critics to accuse Seiffert of
revisionism. Carole Angier, for example, chides Seiffert for choosing to focus on the
pain of ordinary Germans both during and after the war: “The sufferings of those who
espoused an ideology of 1,000-year domination and genocide are not the same as the
sufferings of innocent people, even after more than 56 years” (36-7). Such criticism,
which insists that all perpetrators must be linked to the ideology served by their actions,
misses Seiffert’s point about human fallibility and the contingencies impinging on
personal agency. More importantly, it highlights the enduring importance of the issues
at stake. In raising the question and provoking such reactions, Seiffert’s novel
demonstrates the continuing power of the now relatively distant past to influence
thinking in the present, symbolized by the particular dynamics of the relationship
between grandparent and grandchild.
It is this relationship that forms the core of Everything is Illuminated, in which a
grandfather with a terrible war secret tells his grandson: “I am not a bad person. I am a
good person who has lived in a bad time” (227). This novel may only be understood in
relation to the circumstances of its production. Its author, Jonathan Safran Foer, was
born in 1977 and grew up in the U.S.A. When still a college student, aged nineteen, he
travelled to Ukraine in search of his Jewish family history. His grandfather, Lewis
Safran, had escaped from the Nazi assault in 1941 that wiped out his village and killed
most of its occupants, including Safran senior’s wife and daughter. Safran met his
second wife, Foer’s grandmother, in a displaced person’s camp in Poland before
moving to America and continuing the family line. Foer’s interest in this history was
sparked by his mother passing him a photograph of Safran with the family who helped
him escape. He travelled to the region in search of any surviving members of this
family, and of any remains of the village, but found no trace whatsoever. This
experience led to the writing of the novel, in which Foer constructs a much more
eventful version of his journey, extrapolating an unrestrained narrative of farce and
fantasy from his experience. In an interview, Foer has described how he sees this
process of transforming real life into fiction: “In a certain sense the book wasn’t an act
of creation so much as it was an act of replacement. I encountered a hole – and it was
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like the hole that I found was in myself, and one that I wanted to try to fill up” (Wagner
14). I interrogate the terms of this statement later in this chapter.
Everything is Illuminated is an experimental and semi-autobiographical novel that
addresses themes of generational memory, family secrets, and the ethical relation of the
present to the past through a combination of picaresque narrative, epistolary interludes
and magical realism. Despite its complex structure, it is at base a quest, a journey that
leads in all its various strands towards one dark destination: the Holocaust. The novel
contains two narrative strands, one present-day, one historical. The first may be seen as
a fantasy based on Foer’s real-life journey. On 2nd July 1997, exactly a year after
Ukraine’s adoption of a new democratic constitution, “Jonathan Safran Foer” arrives
from New York carrying a photograph of his grandfather, “Safran”. In the photo
alongside Safran are the family who saved him from the Nazis, a young girl and her
parents. On the back is an ambiguous inscription: “This is me with Augustine, February
21, 1943”. Jonathan surmises that “me” refers to Safran, “Augustine” to the young girl,
and that there was a relationship between them. As forty-four years have passed, the
parents are probably dead, but Augustine might still be alive; Jonathan’s purpose is to
find and thank her, but also, as a Jewish American descendant of immigrants, to trace
his European ancestral roots. To do so he must find his grandfather’s former shtetl,
“Trachimbrod”.
Jonathan’s search is narrated by his Ukrainian translator and guide, “Alex Perchov”, in
the form of chapters (“divisions”) sent later to Jonathan for editing and approval. Each
division is accompanied by a letter which adds background and alludes to suggestions
for narrative changes by Jonathan in his (unrevealed) replies. Thus the notional act of
writing is divided between two fictional characters. Each chapter describes an episode
in the initially farcical but increasingly sombre journey towards the discoveries
(“illumination”) made by both young men. Their driver is Alex’s grandfather, who is
inexplicably accompanied by a psychotic guide dog. The humour of this section is at
the expense both of Jonathan, whose search is both incomprehensible and lucrative for
the Ukrainians, and of Alex and his grandfather, who are comically incompetent.
Nevertheless they eventually find what remains of Trachimbrod: an old woman living in
isolation who has preserved, in labelled boxes, a motley collection of salvaged
mementoes and bric-a-brac from the destroyed shtetl. When told they are searching for
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Trachimbrod, she replies: “You are here. I am it” (118). She takes them to the site,
now an empty field with a plaque commemorating the community’s destruction.
Though not the Augustine they were looking for (her name is Lista), she nevertheless
remembers sharing her youth with Jonathan’s grandfather before the war.
Here the tone of the novel changes and two Holocaust tales are related. Lista claims to
have survived the Nazi assault on Trachimbrod because, pregnant, she was sadistically
shot between the legs and left to crawl away; the baby took the bullet and she survived
the rest of the war hiding in the nearby forest. Like fellow Holocaust survivor Rosa in
Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl, Lista still believes that her lost child is alive: ‘“I must go in
and care for my baby,’ she said. ‘It is missing me”’ (Foer, Everything 193). The second
story is told by Alex’s grandfather, who is prompted by one of Lista’s photographs to
reveal his own momentous (though heavily trailed) secret. Again, this tale recalls
earlier Holocaust literature, in this case William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. Now
revealed as “Eli”, the grandfather admits that he is not from Odessa as previously
claimed, but from a village near Trachimbrod. A gentile, he feels that he betrayed his
Jewish friend Herschel during a Nazi round up. The officer in charge ordered the
villagers to point to Jews in their midst, on pain of death. Though Eli’s choice was
between pointing at Herschel or being killed along with his own wife and baby, his life
has been ruined by guilt: “[Herschel] was my best friend [. . .]. And I murdered him”
(228).
This repentant confession (which contrasts markedly with his earlier casual antiSemitism) is also used to explain the dysfunction within the family, a sub-plot narrated
in Alex’s letters to Jonathan. The baby saved by Eli’s so-called act of betrayal grew up
to be Alex’s violent, alcoholic father. Thus it is suggested that the father’s personality
problems, and their consequent effect on Alex, stem from the repressed secrets of his
origin. Here Eli explains to Alex why he moved away from the scene of his shame after
the war and resettled in Odessa:
I wanted so much for [my son] to live a good life, without death and without
choices and without shame. But I was not a good father, I must inform you. I
was the worst father. I desired to remove him from everything that was bad, but
instead I gave him badness upon badness. A father is always responsible for
how his son is. You must understand. (247)
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At the end of the novel, Eli commits suicide. Alex, however, who symbolizes the
economic problems of the former Soviet republics, in which the population look to the
West while being constrained by their ties to the East, eventually stands up to his father,
takes charge of his family, and gives up on his dream to move to America.
This strand of the novel, then, runs the gamut of well-worn Holocaust themes: sadistic
cruelty, impossible choices, miraculous escape, traumatic memory of survivors, guilty
secrets of bystanders, and corrosive legacy for subsequent generations. However, it is
saved from cliché by the narrative verve with which the eye-witness testimony is
related, using ungrammatical stream-of-consciousness to convey both psychological
trauma and the temporal sweep of horrific events (a technique developed further in
Foer’s later novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which deals with the events of
“ 9/11”). Here, Eli is telling Alex how he remembers the Nazi round-up in his village:
[. . .] who is a Jew the General asked me again and I felt on my other hand the
hand of Grandmother and I knew that she was holding your father and that he
was holding you and that you were holding your children I am so afraid of dying
I am soafraidofdying Iamsoafraidofdying Iamsoafraidofdying and I said he is a
Jew who is a Jew the General asked and Herschel embraced my hand with much
strength and he was my friend he was my best friend [. . .]. (250)
This idea of potentiality, expressed by the metaphor of “holding” one’s descendants
within oneself, both reflects and inverts the theme of generational memory which is at
the heart of the novel. This theme is the driving force of the second strand of the
narrative, an imagined history of Trachimbrod focusing on the years 1791-1804 and
1934-41. This magical realist account owes much to Gabriel García Márquez’ One
Hundred Years of Solitude, not just in style but also in its themes of the circularity of
history and the consequences of remembrance. It consists of short episodes that
alternate with the present-day quest story. In the overarching narrative time of the
novel, these chapters are being written by Jonathan, who has now returned to New
York; he sends them to Alex for comments, just as Alex is writing and sending his
“divisions” to Jonathan from Odessa. Jonathan recreates Trachimbrod in vast detail,
including imagined entries in the shtetl’s “Book of Recurring Dreams” and “Book of
Antecedents”, apparently in order to highlight the tragic poignancy of a lost community.
However, the story of the shtetl’s main importance to Jonathan lies in the connections
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he makes between its legends and his own presumed ancestors, as he audaciously
moves beyond his relationship with his grandfather back through several further
branches of his supposed family tree.
Jonathan’s account of the shtetl begins with the myth of how Trachimbrod got its name.
In 1791, a passing wagon driven by “Trachim B” is said to have lost course and sunk to
the bottom of the river, releasing a wealth of exotic flotsam to the surface. One item
rescued from the accident is a baby, named Brod after the river in which she is found,
and claimed by Jonathan as his five-time great-grandmother. The second legend relates
to Brod’s husband, known as “the Kolker”, who miraculously survives a flourmill
incident, leaving him with a circular saw embedded, coxcomb-like, in his skull. After
dying a few years later, the Kolker’s body is bronzed into a statue, known as the “Dial”
because the circular saw works as a sundial. The Dial becomes both a good luck charm
for the Trachimbroders and a site of generational memory for the Kolker’s descendants.
The narrative then jumps to the 1930s, focusing on Safran, Jonathan’s grandfather; here
the two strands begin to merge, as this Safran corresponds to the man remembered by
Lista in the present-day narrative. However, in the shtetl strand Safran’s story is turned
into legend. Jonathan extrapolates wildly from short entries found in Safran’s journal to
create an improbable tale of a sexually rapacious teenager with romantic longings.
Extra-textually, meanwhile, Safran eventually merges with Foer’s historical
grandfather: he marries, loses his wife and baby in the Nazi assault, escapes, and
immigrates to the United States after the war.
Everything is Illuminated is, then, both structurally and thematically dualistic. The
alternating narrative strands enable the climax to be approached from two different
trajectories, one looking backwards in time while travelling towards in space, the other
moving forward in time from the distant past. Both converge on the same geographical
point, which gradually assumes the terrible status of inevitable target. Just as Jonathan
and Alex reach the former site of Trachimbrod, the shtetl narrative reaches the time
when the Germans arrived there in 1941. Thus the Holocaust as an event is represented
through both the first-person memories of (fictional) survivors in the present and a
magical realist “historical” account. This in turn enables a dual perspective on the
Holocaust as theme: first, its continuing legacy, represented by the corrosive effect on
victims’ descendants and the urge to search for traces; and second, the human loss of
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families and communities, made poignant through description of their heritage, myths,
genealogy, and daily lives. Simultaneously remembrance and commemoration, the
novel seeks to show how the Holocaust both changed history and continues to
reverberate in the present.
However, the crucial component of the novel’s duality is the structural relation between
the characters “Jonathan Safran Foer” and “Alex Perchov”. Jonathan, signalled as a
version of the author by correspondence of name, might be considered, like Sebald’s
narrator, in terms of a narrative persona. However, in contrast to Sebald’s first-person
focalisation, in Foer’s novel Jonathan is represented through the narration of another.
Jonathan never speaks for himself; we only learn of him through Alex’s account. Thus
while in Sebald’s narratives the self-reflexive interrogation of the ethics of writing is
rendered as interiority (just as Seiffert portrays Micha’s self-questioning through
italics), in Foer the issues are addressed at one remove through accusation by a third
party. A couple of examples will illustrate this contrast. In The Emigrants, Sebald’s
empathic narrative persona confronts his doubts in digressional asides. For example, in
the section on “Max Ferber”, he explains how he spent a winter trying to write up an
account of Ferber’s memories:
It was an arduous task. Often I could not get on for hours or days at a time, and
not infrequently I unravelled what I had done, continuously tormented by
scruples that were taking tighter hold and steadily paralysing me. These
scruples concerned not only the subject of my narrative, which I felt I could not
do justice to, but also the entire questionable business of writing. (230)
In Everything is Illuminated, in contrast, Jonathan’s scruples are rendered as Alex’s
criticisms. Alex becomes, in effect, a site of self-reflexivity, commenting both on
Jonathan’s actions in Ukraine and on his writing of the shtetl history. Here, for
example, Alex gives his reaction to Jonathan’s exaggerated tale of Safran’s sexual
conquests:
How can you do this to your grandfather, writing about his life in such a
manner? Could you write in this manner if he was alive? And if not, what does
that signify? [. . .] We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes? The both of
us? Do you think that this is acceptable when we are writing about things that
occurred? (179)
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Such questions serve as a self-reflexive examination of the ethical issues raised by the
writing of this novel. Choosing to express these doubts through another character’s
reaction imposes a layer of distance between narration and protagonist that perhaps
reflects the greater distance between Foer and his subject than is the case for Sebald,
whose posture is one of close personal connection to the people he describes. Foer, two
generations removed, perhaps cannot find a first-person voice to describe events in
which he took no part, and, while appearing in his narrative, nevertheless chooses to
invent another character through which to view his own (real and imagined) actions.
However, this only holds for one strand of the novel. In the other – the largely thirdperson narration of the “history” of the shtetl – Jonathan occasionally lapses into the
first person to establish connection with his supposed ancestors. Describing the lottery
in 1791 to find an adoptive father for Brod, Jonathan writes that the Rabbi “put the
letters in her crib, vowing to give my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother – and,
in a certain sense, me – to the author of the first note she grabbed for” (21). This
“certain sense” is a deeply felt bloodline connection to his ancestors. When “Yankel D”
becomes Brod’s father, Jonathan writes: “We were in good hands” (22). Here “we”
refers to Brod, Jonathan, and all the generations in between. Later, he even describes
his visit to Ukraine as a homecoming, despite never having set foot in the country: “I
am the final piece of proof that all citizens who leave eventually return” (47). The
theme of identification with ancestors also appears in the story of “Safran” in the 1930s,
who in late adolescence realises that his resemblance to “the Kolker”, as preserved in
the Dial statue, is a mixed blessing:
Safety and profound sadness: he was growing into his place in the family; he
looked unmistakably like his father’s father’s father’s father’s father, and
because of that, because his cleft chin spoke of the same mongrel gene-stew
(stirred by the chefs of war, disease, opportunity, love, and false love), he was
granted a place in a long line – certain assurances of being and permanence, but
also a burdensome restriction of movement. He was no longer free. (121)
By embedding this theme of transgenerational connection into a novel dealing with the
Holocaust, Foer may risk a problematic ethics of representation. Do his characters’
moments of ancestor-identification amount to what LaCapra calls “unchecked
identification, vicarious experience, and surrogate victimage” (Writing 40)? Does Foer
somehow claim affinity with his Jewish ancestors and thereby assume understanding of
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their experience of persecution? I would suggest that Foer’s dualistic narrative, using
multiple narrative voices, goes some way towards counteracting such tendencies by
enabling him to approach the Holocaust with simultaneous proximity and distance, that
is, with empathy rather than identification. A version of the author – Jonathan – takes
part in the modern day story, as it were in person, and in his imagined history of
Trachimbrod makes many explicit links between himself and his ancestors. Yet by
using another character, Alex, to tell the present-day story and to criticize Jonathan’s
writing and actions, Foer provides a site of self-reflexivity and critical objectivity. One
way of considering this structure would be to read Alex as another side of Jonathan’s
personality, or as his conscience; they combine, in effect, to form one narrative persona.
Proximity and distance, represented by Jonathan and Alex respectively, thus co-exist in
a dual persona, which has the potential to enable an empathic approach to history.
In Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (1997), Marianne Hirsch
coins the influential term postmemory, which is “distinguished from memory by
generational distance and from history by deep personal connection” and which
“characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that
preceded their birth” (22). This appears to offer a fit with Foer’s combination of critical
distance and personal proximity (though just how “dominated” his childhood was by the
past is speculation). Moreover, just as Hirsch’s theoretical analysis of ancestral history
and memory is underlaid by an interest in the power of family photographs, so the plot
of Everything is Illuminated is driven by two such pictures which exert extraordinary
motivating force upon the characters. A photograph of Alex’s grandfather alongside his
wife, baby and murdered friend Herschel, discovered in one of the boxes of
Trachimbrod remnants, prompts a war story and confession hitherto repressed for over
forty years. Even more crucial to the narrative is the photograph of Jonathan’s
grandfather and the family who sheltered him during the war, which inspires the
journey to Europe in the first place.
Hirsch sees old family photographs as a powerful medium between memory and
postmemory. To develop her thesis, she invokes Roland Barthes’ account, in Camera
Lucida, of recognising his five-year-old mother in an old photograph. Barthes sees such
photographs as “a physical, material emanation of a past reality” (Hirsch, Family 6).
While noting that this assertion disregards both the representational nature of
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photographs and their vulnerability to manipulation and falsification, Hirsch
nevertheless argues that Barthes’ comments reveal a powerful promise of a kind of truth
held within family photographs: “The picture exists because something was there, and
thus, in my own family pictures, I, like Barthes, can hope to find some truth about the
past, mine and my family’s – however mediated” (6). However, Hirsch departs from
Barthes by arguing that photographs do not have any direct connection to the past:
“Photography’s relation to loss and death is not to mediate the process of individual and
collective memory but to bring the past back in the form of a ghostly revenant,
emphasizing, at the same time, its immutable and irreversible pastness and
irretrievability” (20). Postmemory, similarly, exists at one remove from the actual past.
Its “connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through
an imaginative investment and creation” (22). Postmemory, in common with
photographs taken by people other than ourselves, contains an implicit acknowledgment
of its intrinsic separation from the past to which it refers.
Foer, in his real-life journey to Europe, hoped that his grandfather’s photograph would
lead to some truth about his family. Instead, his search revealed precisely the
“immutable and irreversible pastness and irretrievability” of the past; as he stated in an
interview, “I just found – nothing. At all” (Wagner 14). But in his novel, he could be
said to use his postmemory, triggered by the photograph, to recreate the past through an
“imaginative investment and creation”. However, the issue is more complicated. The
example Hirsch uses is Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which dramatizes the interaction
between the authorial persona and his survivor father. The father, Hirsch argues,
mediates between Spiegelman’s memory and postmemory by providing commentary on
three family photographs, which are moreover reproduced in the book alongside the
comic strip panels. Hirsch terms this strategy the “aesthetics of postmemory” (40).
However, in Everything is Illuminated, no such mediation is provided; the photograph is
given to Jonathan without comment, only a cryptic inscription on its back. This signals
the distance between Jonathan and the past, unbridgeable unless by the kind of
imaginative identification undertaken in his “history” of Trachimbrod. The difference,
of course, between Spiegelman and Foer is that the former is the child of survivors, a
member of what is often referred to as the “second generation,” whereas the latter is
born even later, thus enacting what might be termed a third-generation aesthetics of
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post-postmemory.13 Foer’s “imaginative investment and creation” is entirely his own,
and does not benefit, like Spiegelman’s, from the input of an eye-witness from the
previous generation.
Here, then, it is the truth-telling, evidential nature of photography which is at stake. In
her assessment of the second generation, Hirsch concurs with Barthes that some trace of
the past may be found through photographs. But I would argue that third-generation
texts of post-postmemory precisely refute this possibility. In The Dark Room, for
example, the unreliability of photographic evidence is a recurring theme. In addition to
the story of Micha discussed above, this “novella triptych” (as the critic Petra Rau calls
it) includes two other, apparently unconnected narratives. In the first, “Helmut” is a
young Berliner in the 1930s who, owing to a slight disability, does not join the
widespread army mobilization but stays behind to witness the city’s destruction. An
expert amateur photographer, he attempts to record the events on his camera but with
limited success. On one occasion he comes upon a group of gypsies being herded into
trucks by the police. Despite his best efforts, when he comes to develop the pictures
they “convey none of the chaos and cruelty” (40), and even fail to clearly show what
happened.
Seiffert’s second narrative, meanwhile, is set at the end of the war. 12-year-old Lore,
the daughter of interned Nazi parents, leads her younger siblings on foot across divided
Germany. Along the way she encounters photographs pinned up on trees depicting the
horrors of the camps. However, this evidence is met with disbelief by others. As one
young man is overhead saying on a train: “It’s all a set-up. The pictures are always out
of focus, aren’t they? Or dark, or grainy. Anything to make them unclear. And the
people in those photos are actors. The Americans have staged it all, maybe the Russians
helped them, who knows” (175). Finally, in “Micha”, the protagonist steals
photographs from his grandmother to help in his search for the truth about his
grandfather, but instead he relies on the memory of an old man and his own reasoned
deduction. Yet memory also fails when the distance is so great. As Efraim Sicher
writes of Seiffert’s central metaphor: “The dark room, where the negatives of historical
memory are developed, remains dark, shedding no light on knowledge of the past”
Christoph Ribbat also makes this point, noting that Foer is “twice removed from events,” (212) and that
he “knows only ‘post-postmemory’ (because that is all there is to know)” (213).
13
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(Holocaust Novel 196). The same may be said of Everything is Illuminated, whose title
should be read as deeply ironic. Jonathan’s photograph of “Augustine” proves to be a
red herring; she is never found and never will be. In this novel, though photographs
provoke the search, they cannot in themselves lead to knowledge of the past when the
chain of human connection is broken by generational distance. Where Spiegelman’s
father was on hand to help explain his ambiguous photographs, Foer’s pictures exist at
one remove from lived reality.
Despite this difference, Spiegelman and Foer, as fellow Americans, share what Hirsch
calls a sense of “diasporic” or “temporal and spatial exile” (245) from their ancestry.
Hirsch argues that European-extraction Jews of her (second) generation feel a “sense of
exile from a world we have never seen and which, because it was irreparably changed or
destroyed not by natural or historical change over time but by the sudden violent
annihilation of the Holocaust, we will never see” (242). (In Everything is Illuminated,
this irreparable destruction is illustrated by the empty field where Trachimbrod once
stood.) Hirsch goes on: “None of us ever knows the world of our parents. How much
more ambivalent is this curiosity for children of Holocaust survivors, exiled from a
world that has ceased to exist, that has been violently erased” (242-3). This raises the
question: How much more ambivalent is such curiosity for grandchildren of survivors
like Foer (and Jonathan)? If children of survivors “forge an aesthetics of postmemory
with photographs as the icons of their ambivalent longing” (246), what is the nature of
an aesthetics of post-postmemory, similarly curious, similarly inspired by photographs,
but containing even less hope of direct connection to the past?
An important dimension of this aesthetic is socio-geographical. One way of viewing
Everything is Illuminated is through the lens of twenty-first century American attitudes
towards the Holocaust. This has certainly been the focus of the few articles on this
novel that have so far appeared. Aliki Varvogli, for example, notes that for Jonathan,
“the trauma of the Holocaust resides in Europe” (89), that is, his conception of the past
is as geographical as it is historical. Echoing Hirsch’s point about temporal and spatial
exile, Varvogli continues:
His [Jonathan’s] desire to uncover his grandfather’s past and thus complete the
picture of his family history shows that even a young American, born in the late
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1970s, cannot have a complete sense of his identity and his place in the world
while he remains ignorant of how European history affected his own forefathers.
To be Jewish American, the novel suggests, is to be somehow incomplete, since
part of the meaning of that identity is linked with a past that happened
elsewhere. (89)
Here a claim is made for Jewish American experience which may just as easily apply to
anyone with an immigrant background. Similarly, Lee Behlman, who analyses Foer
alongside two other contemporary writers, Michael Chabon and Nathan Englander,
argues:
What stands out about the recent fictions under discussion here is the degree to
which they emphasize the now-vast temporal and cultural distance between late
twentieth and twenty-first century America and the Holocaust, as well as the gap
between our time and the American experience of the Holocaust for previous
generations. (60-1)
Again, this “distance” is surely common to all historical fiction, not just American
novels about the Holocaust. Here I am perhaps being disingenuous; both Varvogli and
Behlman’s arguments spring from the novel’s explicit engagement with the idea of
America through Alex’s misconceptions about the country and the mismatch of cultures
figured by Jonathan’s experience in Ukraine. However, articles like Varvogli’s that
emphasize “Jewish American experience” may serve to reinforce the tendentious
suggestion that Holocaust memory in some way resides in, or belongs to, the modernday United States. Indeed, what seems to be informing the American focus both in
Foer’s novel and its critiques by others is the recent outpouring of self-criticism in
American discourse, most notably articulated in Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in
American Life (1999) and Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry (2000).
Finkelstein calls the way the idea of the “Holocaust” has become central to modern
American culture a “fraudulent misappropriation of history for ideological purposes”
(61). For Finkelstein these purposes are often to do with economic appropriation and
exploitation. However, as Novick points out, they also may conceal an evasive and
morally reprehensible Eurocentricism or “screen memory” that serves to obscure the
guilt and reparation owed by America to its own history, for example the genocide of
natives by European settlers and the enslavement of African-Americans. As Novick
puts it:
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[. . .] the pretense that the Holocaust is an American memory – that Americans,
either diffusely, as part of Western civilization, or specifically, as complicit
bystanders, share responsibility for the Holocaust – works to devalue the notion
of historical responsibility. It leads to the shirking of those responsibilities that
do belong to Americans as they confront their past, their present, and their
future. (15, emphasis in original)
This argument could, of course, lead to an inward-looking, parochial stance that
disregards Holocaust history. Neil Levi makes this point, noting that the concept of
“screen memories” originates in Freud’s 1899 essay “Über Deckerinnerungen,” which
draws on the German verb decken, to cover. Levi argues that this leads to a problem:
any balanced comparison of collective memories is difficult if one is always presumed
to “cover” the other. Levi further points out that for Freud,
screen memories are distinguished by a vivid but insignificant content. If we
take the psychoanalytic term seriously, then those who promote the idea of the
Holocaust as screen memory might be seen as proposing that the Holocaust is an
improbable, even puzzling thing for certain countries to remember: why
remember events that took place at such geographical distance from your own
nation? The borders of the nation state become the boundaries of proper and
significant national memory (126).
Christoph Ribbat takes up this point, putting Foer’s novel in the context of the
conflicting claims in that country for African-American and Jewish suffering. Echoing
Levi, Ribbat notes that this contest has led to a fear that “[t]he murder of the European
Jews might become a marginal subject” (202), a fear which novels like Foer’s may
serve to allay. Susanne Rohr goes further by arguing that Everything is Illuminated
represents a critique of Holocaust discourse, rather than merely a reflection or product
of the intellectual climate in which it was written. Rohr says that Foer’s novel
addresses not the Holocaust itself but the “rhetoric of Holocaust representation” (241)
which has accrued since the event. It deals with “not the unrepresentable but the
discourse of the unrepresentable” (242, emphasis in original). For Rohr, this excuses
the farcical and slapstick humour of the novel, which is aimed not at the Holocaust
itself, but instead “targets the transfer of knowledge, commemoration practices,
processes of medialization and Americanization involved in representations of the
Shoah” (244).
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Rohr highlights an important element of the novel, but this is not the whole story.
Everything is Illuminated cannot be reduced to a disinterested, distanced, selfconsciously postmodernist meta-discourse, for three reasons: first, the personal
investment of its author; secondly, the use of first-person memories of (fictional)
survivors; and thirdly, the correspondence between “Trachimbrod” and a real shtetl of
that name, which, like Foer’s creation, was destroyed during World War II.
This third aspect, the re-imagining of real events, usually goes by the name of historical
fiction. However, Foer’s novel aims to transcend genre fiction through its use of
magical realism, complications of narrative time and voice, and apparent lack of
reference to the historical record. Yet by fictionalising events related to the Holocaust,
the novel strays into ethically contested territory. In order to address this issue I will
begin by comparing Foer’s Trachimbrod story with two historical documents of
differing provenance and authority: the “Yizkor” book of that shtetl, and Raul Hilberg’s
The Destruction of the European Jews (1961).
Yizkor books, which commemorate and memorialize individual communities destroyed
in the Holocaust, are usually written by surviving former residents. Published in Israel,
in the languages of Hebrew and Yiddish, they are subject to digitization and translation
projects which make them available both for individuals tracing personal genealogy and
for more general educational and consciousness-raising purposes. The Yizkor Book
Project at www.jewishgen.org/yizkor enables place name searches which call up
digitized versions of the books themselves and supplementary geographical and
historical information.
In Everything is Illuminated, Foer refers to his shtetl both as Trachimbrod, the name its
residents use, and Sofiowka, the official name given by local authorities. A search for
these names on the Yizkor database produces the same result: a book published in 1988
as Ha-ilan ve-shoreshav; sefer korot T’’L Zofiowka-Ignatowka, or The tree and the
roots: the history of T. L. (Sofyovka and Ignatovka). Several authors are listed, the first
being Yakov Vainer. Meanwhile, the database confirms Trachimbrod as one of the
many names given to this settlement over the centuries. This suggests that Foer’s reallife grandfather was from this place, or that Foer picked up the name elsewhere,
possibly knowing that it was a real community. In the novel, Jonathan gives precise
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geographical co-ordinates for Trachimbrod: it “rest[s] twenty-three kilometers southeast
of Lvov, four north of Kolki, and straddl[es] the Polish-Ukrainian border like a twig
alighted on a fence” (50-1). This differs significantly from the location given in the
Yizkor database, which places it much farther north, in the area near Luts’k. Though
the difference is minor in terms of historical significance – both locations are within the
region that has changed hands between Poland and Ukraine at various times over the
last two hundred years, and which was comprehensively decimated by the Nazi mobile
killing units – it remains curious that Foer chose to give a precise, but apparently
deliberately wrong, geographical siting for his shtetl. (It should be noted, however, that
neither siting corresponds to a current settlement; just as Foer’s characters find only an
empty field, there is no Sofiowka or Trachimbrod on modern maps, testament to the
“success” of the Nazi operation.) Another “factual” discrepancy is the date of the
shtetl’s founding, given by Foer as 1791; the Yizkor account suggests 1827 at the
earliest. It is not known whether Foer used the Yizkor book as a source. Nevertheless,
perhaps these geographical and temporal discrepancies are intended to distance the
novel from any “real” history of Trachimbrod, a subtle shift of place and time that
parallels the symbolic and stylistic modal shifts imposed by the author.
To be sure, the historical accuracy of the Yizkor account is itself questionable, not least
because of its Zionist bias and understandable desire to emphasize the positive side of
the Jewish character. Indeed, Foer’s shtetl story and the Yizkor account can be read as
representing competing, and equally tendentious, claims about the nature of
“Jewishness”. Foer’s Trachimbroders are eccentric, superstitious, sexually incontinent
and obsessed with memory and tradition. This may be seen, for example, in their
obsession with “Brod”, the mysterious young girl Jonathan claims as his ancestor:
By her twelfth birthday, my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother had
received at least one proposal of marriage from every citizen of Trachimbrod:
from men who already had wives, from broken old men who argued on stoops
about things that might or might not have happened decades before, from boys
without armpit hair, from women with armpit hair, and from the deceased
philosopher Pinchas T, who, in his only notable paper, “To the Dust: From Man
You Came and to Man You Shall Return,” argued it would be possible, in
theory, for life and art to be reversed. (90)
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In contrast, the Yizkor account praises the Jews of this area for their “national
faithfulness, love of the people, love of family, good friendship, morality and humanity,
enthusiastic popularity, Jewish charm and humane emphasis on a life of spiritual
nobility, honesty and modesty” (III). Foer’s shtetl appears as a cohesive, autonomous
community, untouched by the outside world until the arrival of the German army in
1941, while the Yizkor book portrays a helpless group of individuals shunted from
place to place as successive edicts from the Russian authorities constantly endanger and
disrupt their lives. While Foer’s approach serves in its way to praise the Jewish way of
life by emphasising its unsuspecting innocence – heightening the rhetorical effect of the
community’s eventual destruction – the Yizkor authors’ stress on enforced assimilation,
compulsory military service and enforced agriculturalization, all leading to a perpetual
struggle to survive, makes the generational and community continuity central to Foer’s
vision appear highly improbable.
One way that Foer’s assertion of continuity is expressed is through the fictional
community’s founding legend, which is invoked repeatedly over the centuries:
It was March 18, 1791, when Trachim B’s double-axle wagon either did or did
not pin him against the bottom of the Brod River. The young W twins were the
first to see the curious flotsam rising to the surface: wandering snakes of white
string, a crushed-velvet glove with outstretched fingers, barren spools,
schmootzy pince-nez, rasp- and boysenberries, feces, frillwork, the shards of a
shattered atomizer, the bleeding red-ink script of a resolution: I will...I will.... (8)
This myth is dismissed by the Yizkor book, which gives a more prosaic account of the
establishment of the shtetl:
[. . .] a number of Jews from the adjoining villages got together and bought from
a certain squire whose name was Truchen a parcel of land covered with forests
and a swamp which was known by the name of the Brod (swamp in Russian) of
Truchen and in Yiddish ‘truchenbrod’ and so the place was called by the people
until the bitter end – the holocaust. (One shouldn't take seriously the story of that
a peasant by the name of Truchen was drowned there in the swamp, and the
place was called by his name and accident, one cannot accept that Jews during
the course of generations would call the place where they lived by a name based
on such a banal story). (XXVI)
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Such non-acceptance signifies the determination of the Yizkor authors to portray the
Jews of Trachimbrod as strong, wilful and forward-looking, in contrast to Foer’s
“banal”, whimsical, myth-obsessed innocents.
This innocence becomes tragic in Foer’s description of the reaction of the
Trachimbroders to the arrival of the Germans in 1941. In this part of the story, there is
a nine-month gap between hearing the first bombs nearby and the Nazis’ destruction of
the shtetl itself. Why did they not attempt to flee to safety? Jonathan writes:
Trachimbrod itself was overcome by a strange inertness. The citizenry [. . .]
now sat on their hands. Activity was replaced with thought. Memory.
Everything reminded everyone of something, which seemed winsome at first –
when early birthdays could be recalled by the smell of an extinguished match, or
the feeling of one’s first kiss by sweat in the palm – but quickly became
devitalizing. Memory begat memory begat memory. Villagers became
embodiments of that legend they had been told so many times, of mad Sofiowka,
swaddled in white string, using memory to remember memory, bound in an
order of remembrance, struggling in vain to remember a beginning or end. (258)
Echoing One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which the residents of Macondo wallow in
nostalgia while the civil war approaches, this passage takes the familiar trope of Jewish
obsession with memory and turns it into an obstacle to survival. Yet Foer’s narrator is
quick to universalize this experience: “They waited to die, and we cannot blame them,
because we would do the same, and we do do the same” (262, emphasis in original).
Another writer who has addressed the question of Jewish reaction to the impending
catastrophe is Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg. In The Destruction of the European
Jews (1961), Hilberg argues that their response to the Nazi threat was a “disaster” (24),
and insists upon “the role of the Jews in their own destruction” (123). For Hilberg,
Jews over the centuries had learned to deal with persecution through alleviation,
compliance, evasion and paralysis, only very rarely displaying resistance or aggression.
More specifically, in relation to the mobile killing operations in the region where Foer’s
novel is set, Hilberg advances further reasons for this passivity. Recent history had
taught the Jews of this area to expect better treatment from Germans than from
Russians; at the end of World War I “the Germans had come as quasi-liberators” (123).
Also, owing to censorship of the Russian media, “[t]he Jews of Russia were ignorant of
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the fate that had overtaken the Jews in Nazi Europe” (124). The result, according to
Hilberg, was not only a lack of resistance but also no attempt to flee:
It is a fact, now confirmed by many documents, that the Jews made an attempt to
live with Hitler. In many cases they failed to escape while there was still time
and, more often still, they failed to step out of the way when the killers were
already upon them.
There are moments of impending disaster when almost any conceivable action
will only make suffering worse or bring final agonies closer. In such situations
the victims may lapse into paralysis. The reaction is barely overt, but in 1941 a
German observer noted the symptomatic fidgeting of the Jewish community in
Galicia as it awaited death, between shocks of killing operations, in “nervous
despair.” (22-3)
“Fidgeting” and “nervous despair” brought on by multiple historical, psychological and
practical factors are transformed, in Foer’s story, into a vision of a community
consumed with (and indeed “paralysed” by) remembrance. To be sure, the outcome is
the same: the systematic destruction of entire communities as part of a wider genocidal
plan. But what exactly is the relation between the differing accounts by Hilberg and
Foer of the same historical moment? How can we understand the categories of history
and fiction that are at play here? And what are the ethical issues attendant on the
transformation of controversial historical “fact” into fiction?
One writer who has explored these questions is the French hermeneutic philosopher
Paul Ricoeur, whose Time and Narrative (1985) has been called “the central
contemporary study of historical fiction” (Middleton and Woods 68). In his chapter on
“The Interweaving of History and Fiction,” Ricoeur begins by arguing that it is only
through empathic imagination that the writer is able to represent the Other. This
empathy consists of an act of “seeing as...” or “providing oneself a figure of...” (181).
Thus the writer’s imagination includes an “ocular dimension” (185) which expresses
itself in narrative through figurative language. Meanwhile, the reader enters into a
“pact” with the author, suspending disbelief and entering the “realm of illusion”. For
Ricoeur, this “fiction-effect” (186) is crucial to historical writing about horrific events
such as the Holocaust. Fiction’s “controlled illusion” provides a balance between the
“illusion of presence” and “critical distance,” a balance which prevents the
“individuation” produced by horrible events being experienced by the reader as mere
“blind feeling” (188). Instead, the narrator shoulders some of the burden, through the
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ocular dimension: “Fiction gives eyes to the horrified narrator. Eyes to see and to
weep” (188). This formulation appears to imply a truth claim: that the “eyes” are
“seeing” the past event as it really was. Ricoeur’s defence of this claim lies in his idea
of how fiction works. Fictional narrative attains a “quasi-past” that is “quasi-historical”
(190) in that the events described are past facts for the narrator. This produces a
“‘pastlike’ note” of verisimilitude in the sense of what “might have been” (191).
Moreover, this effect works as an ethical constraint on the novelist, equivalent to the
historian’s debt to the dead. Fiction is “internally bound by its obligation to its quasipast” (192).
This defence initially appears strong, especially when considered alongside my theory
of narrative empathy developed in the present study, a simultaneous gesture of
proximity and distance that echoes Ricoeur’s “controlled illusion”. However, in these
terms, Ricoeur’s analysis would appear to render all fictional narration empathic. In
this reading, the “eyes” of the narrator provide both proximity (the “illusion of
presence”) and critical distance simultaneously. This “ocular dimension” provides an
inherent layer of separation that reinforces the knowledge of the other as other, while
combining with the processes of “individuation” and “illusion” as part of an apparently
universal fictional trajectory. Taken together with its alleged “obligation to its quasipast,” fictional narrative emerges in Ricoeur’s account as an ideal empathic medium in
which to render horrific events such as the Holocaust.
However, Ricoeur’s schema is too limited to encompass a novel like Everything is
Illuminated. Ricoeur’s theory places the narrator, rather than the author, at the centre of
the action. Both author and reader “imagine” the event through the “eyes” of the
narrator. The author relies on this layer of separation to ensure that he or she is
positioned towards the event in an ethically responsible manner, while the reader enters
into a “pact” with the author and thereby implicitly trusts the narrator to tell the truth.
But it is clear that any narrative that deviates from standard past-tense realism and
consistency of narration will problematize such a schema. In Everything is Illuminated,
we no longer have a straightforward case of a narrator who is trusted by the reader to do
the “seeing” for her. Foer’s novel challenges Ricoeur’s thesis both through its selfreflexive foregrounding of the problematics of writing and the presence of the dual
authorial persona. The “pact” between author and reader that for Ricoeur is embodied
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by the narrator is deliberately undermined in this novel; the “illusion” is broken. As a
result, any sense of an “obligation to [the] quasi-past” that guarantees the ethical
standpoint of the author or narrator is similarly fractured. This latter problem is crucial
to Foer’s novel, which as we have seen dares to address such contested themes as the
Jewish character and the Holocaust itself through a combination of farce and tragedy.
If Ricoeur’s theory of historical fiction fails to account for Foer’s strategy, what other
ethical justification might there be for his fictional treatment of the Holocaust? One
explanation might be found through an investigation of the personal investment of the
author in his text. Foer, by using his own name as the protagonist, has in a sense forced
himself into the hermeneutic structure of his novel. Asked in an interview about the
relationship between his real-life journey to Ukraine and the subsequent writing of
Everything is Illuminated, the author responded:
‘There wasn’t an Alex. [. . .]. There wasn’t a grandfather, there wasn’t a dog,
there wasn’t a woman I found who resembled the woman in the book – but I did
go, and I just found – nothing. At all. It wasn’t like a literary, interesting kind
of nothing, an inspiring, or a beautiful nothing, it was really like: nothing. It’s
not like anything else I’ve ever experienced in my life. In a certain sense the
book wasn’t an act of creation so much as it was an act of replacement. I
encountered a hole – and it was like the hole that I found was in myself, and one
that I wanted to try to fill up.’ (Wagner 14)
This opposition between “creation” and “replacement” is crucial. Earlier I suggested
that Foer’s use of his post-postmemory necessitates, by its very distance from the past,
what Hirsch calls an “imaginative investment and creation”. Does Foer’s statement
deny this element? In saying that “the book wasn’t an act of creation,” Foer is not of
course disavowing its fictional status. Nevertheless, the statement may imply that
there’s a kind of truth he’s searching for beyond fiction, both about his lost ancestors
and about the losses of the Holocaust in general.
The response to such implicit truth claims has been strongly influenced in recent years
by the Wilkomirski affair (described in detail in Chapter 3 of the present study). Bruno
Dössekker, posing as “Binjamin Wilkomirski”, claimed to have been in concentration
camps as a child, but investigations by Daniel Ganzfried and others have since proved
that he spent the war safe in Switzerland with a succession of foster families. As Stefan
172
Maechler has suggested, Dössekker appears to have replaced his genuine childhood
trauma of adoption with Holocaust “memories” that he has appropriated from others,
and which he apparently believes on some level to be his own (268-73).
Dössekker/Wilkomirski thus claims a past that is not his. Could Foer be accused of
making a comparable claim? Though his grandfather really was a Holocaust survivor
with a European ancestral history, Foer, born two generations later in a different
continent, has no direct personal connection to the trauma of the Holocaust except by an
act of imaginative identification or creation which he nevertheless disavows. Clearly,
Foer’s post-postmemory has a different status to a claim to directly recall the past, but
by apparently denying his creative act Foer threatens to stray into problematic territory
of identification with a past in which he took no part.
However, by calling his novel an “act of replacement” rather than an “act of creation”
Foer hints at the way Everything is Illuminated self-reflexively acknowledges such
problems of truth and representation. Chambers Dictionary defines replace as “to put
back; to provide a substitute for; to take the place of; to supplant”. Replacement
therefore means (at least) two connected things: the act of putting something back
where it once was, and the act of substituting one thing or person for another. We could
say that Foer’s novel aims to re-place the absent Trachimbrod with an imagined
version, to put something back that has been taken away. Or we could say that the
novel acknowledges the permanent absence of the original Trachimbrod (and its
destroyed writings) and provides a substitute for it (in the form of new writing). Foer in
this sense could be said to attempt to substitute content/presence for emptiness/absence.
As Jonathan’s grandfather Safran says of his Gypsy lover’s tall tales, “he knew that the
origin of a story is always an absence, and he wanted her to live among presences”
(230).
Foer’s gesture may be better understood in the light of Derrida’s insight that presence is
always deferred in an infinite chain of “supplements”. Through his deconstruction of
Rousseau, Derrida noted that supplement means not just an addition, but also a
replacement or substitute: “[. . .] the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace.
It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void” (145,
emphasis in original). This “void” may correspond to the “hole” Foer found that he
wanted to “fill up”. But as Derrida argues, this is an impossible task. To attempt it
173
reveals “an infinite chain, ineluctably multiplying the supplementary mediations that
produce the sense of the very thing they defer: the mirage of the thing itself, of
immediate presence, of originary perception” (157).
Everything is Illuminated acknowledges this impossibility through its dual persona
structure. Foer replaces (or supplements) himself with “Jonathan” (his replacement or
supplement), whose narrative voice is itself replaced (supplemented) by that of “Alex”.
The novel may now be seen to be about the inevitable absence at the heart of any
attempt to recapture the past. Its title is heavily ironic; very little of substance is
“illuminated”, only abstract ideas of personal growth, traumatic memory, and so on.
The site of Trachimbrod is an empty field; Augustine cannot be found. Through its
narrative structure, and its multiple representations within representations, Everything is
Illuminated acknowledges that, as a text, it can only refer to itself and its chain of
replacements, never to real people or events from the past. It also mournfully shows the
impossibility of ever knowing one’s ancestors, the abyss at the heart of any such attempt
at transgenerational identification. As Derrida writes: “We are dispossessed of the
longed-for presence in the gesture of language by which we attempt to seize it” (141).
This then is the third-generation aesthetic of post-postmemory, a self-reflexive dialogue
with the self, history, and the idea of authorship itself, that nevertheless achieves a
degree of empathy by combining these distancing elements with the presence of the
author through a dual narrative persona. In this process, Foer avoids over-identification
through the dramatization of its very impossibility, as part of a structure that embeds
within itself the distance between self and other. Taken together, these elements
combine to move beyond the limits of historical fiction as Ricoeur describes it, enabling
a relationship between narrative and the past which might be described as
“transgenerational empathy”.
174
Conclusion: the future of transgenerational empathy
In this study, I have suggested that some approaches to writing contemporary Holocaust
narratives are more appropriate than others. Certain writers, exemplified in this study
by “Binjamin Wilkomirski” and Anne Michaels, seem merely to identify with rather
than empathize with the past. Others, however, respond to the ethical and
epistemological challenges raised by the subject matter by adopting narrative strategies
that correspond to an extent with LaCaprian empathy, which I have defined as a
simultaneous gesture of proximity and distance. W. G. Sebald, for example, transcends
the dangers of identification through what I have called his “empathic narrative
persona”, a figure one generation removed from the Holocaust who nevertheless
engages in acts of personal connection to its victims. Likewise, Jonathan Safran Foer’s
“post-postmemory” finds expression through what I have named his “dual persona”,
enabling Foer, in Everything is Illuminated, to achieve an empathic relation to the past,
despite his even greater generational and geographical distance from the event. The
stance of writers such as Sebald and Foer may be termed “transgenerational empathy”
to account for the way their response to traumatic events is mediated by generational
distance. I have suggested that this dynamic occurs in the hermeneutic space opened up
by Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons”, whereby historical understanding is achieved by
expanding one’s limited purview without leaving it behind, thereby, in Gadamer’s
words, “rising to a higher universality that overcomes not only our own particularity but
also that of the other” (305).
However, this tentative theory of transgenerational empathy is as yet far from complete.
I would like to suggest two areas of future inquiry that might help realise its potential:
what could be termed its temporal dimension, and the kinds of narrative personae found
in the work of other writers. One productive example might be Philip Roth. In a long
and varied career, Roth has often alluded the Holocaust, whether to satirize its use by
Jewish-Americans for their own ends – as in The Ghost Writer (1979) – or to show how
it pervades the psyche of apparently unaffected American Jews – as when the narrator’s
dying mother writes the word “Holocaust” when asked for her name in The Anatomy
Lesson (1983). Another Roth novel, Operation Shylock (1993), deals with the legacy of
the Holocaust in 1980s Israel by incorporating the trial of John Demjanjuk (the socalled “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka) and the theory of “Diasporism”, which argues
175
that Israeli Jews should re-populate the European “homelands” from whence they came.
Notwithstanding this rare foray abroad, which is any case narrated from a visitor’s
viewpoint, Roth’s American perspective is always foregrounded in his novels. But as
Michael Rothberg argues,
it is less the Holocaust and its impact on America that obsesses Roth than the
unbridgeable distance between the Holocaust and American life – and the
inauthenticity of most attempts to lessen that distance. Such an observation does
not mean that Roth minimizes or relativizes the significance of the Holocaust.
To the contrary, he has been, as Milowitz suggests, one of the earliest and most
articulate writers to address the genocide’s devastating singularity. But its
singularity is precisely not American. To use a term inspired by Roth, the
Holocaust is something like the “counter-history” of American life.
Emphasising the Holocaust’s distance rather than its overwhelming proximity
leads to a formulation of the central paradox of Roth’s quite original perspective
on the Shoah: the greater the significance accorded to the Holocaust as an event
of modern history, the more distant a role it plays in the lives of American Jews.
(53)
Rothberg goes on to cite several places where Roth emphasizes the “distance between
Jewish-American security and European tragedy” (62). This insistence on Roth’s use of
distance at the expense of proximity would appear to preclude the writer from empathy
in narrative as I have defined it, which requires a balance of the two. However,
Rothberg’s argument leaves out the personal connection Roth demonstrates through his
use of personae. Of the three books that have the Holocaust as a central theme – The
Ghost Writer, Operation Shylock and The Plot Against America (2004) – two are
narrated by a character named “Philip Roth”, a figure Alan Cooper calls the writer’s
“primal persona” (243). By appearing “in person” as a version of himself who engages
both with Jewish persecution in the Nazi era (The Plot Against America) and the
continuing reverberations of the Holocaust for contemporary Israeli politics (Operation
Shylock), Roth builds in a crucial dimension of proximity through personal connection.
“Philip Roth” is the narrator of The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988),
Deception (1990), Patrimony: A True Story (1991), Operation Shylock, and The Plot
Against America. Like another of Roth’s alter-egos, “Nathan Zuckerman”, this figure
has close biographical connections to its author but enough differences to preclude any
assumption of direct correspondence. In this respect he resembles Sebald’s persona.
However, unlike Sebald (and Foer), Roth was alive during World War II. Born in 1933,
176
he was raised in Newark, New Jersey among assimilated Jewish immigrants. This adds
an extra dimension that enables him, in The Plot Against America, to insert elements
from his own childhood into the history of that time. Where Sebald talks to survivors,
and Foer recreates his lost ancestors, Roth in this novel draws on his own memories in
order to imagine what Jewish persecution by a Nazi-inspired American administration
would have been like.
In this subtle take on the “what-if?” historical novel, Roosevelt loses the election in
1940 to a Republican party led by the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, whose noninterventionist platform later extends to a pact with Hitler and insidious policies of
forced relocation and assimilation against the Jewish population of the United States.
These events are seen through the lives of the Roths of Newark – young Philip, his
parents, brother and extended family – who as assimilated American Jews are perfectly
placed to be torn apart by conflicting loyalties of race and nation. Thus the build-up of
tension, culminating in riots and pogroms before Roosevelt returns and America joins
the war, is depicted simultaneously in the political and domestic spheres. In the context
of the present study, Roth’s placing of a version of himself into a reimagined history of
America, in which the Jewish population is persecuted in ways that cannot help be
compared to 1930s Germany, might be construed as an inappropriate identification with
the fate of the European Jews with whom he has always previously asserted his
difference. As Rothberg says, “it is almost as if the Jews of Newark are the wretched of
Belsen” (64). But I would suggest that Roth’s stance is empathic not identificatory,
since his approach to the Holocaust combines distance, through geographical
displacement and factual distortion, with deep personal connection, based on semifictionalized yet direct memories of the past (in contrast to the post- and postpostmemories of Sebald and Foer).
Indeed, this more literal connection with the past leads to Roth’s characteristic doublevoicedness, in which the adult looks back on the experiences of the child, giving a
perfectly integrated dual perspective that combines nostalgia with fear, experience with
innocence, distance with proximity. Moreover, Roth’s dual perspective suggests how
the empathic dialectic between distance and proximity could be figured more closely in
terms of the temporal dimension. Clearly, time does not always work in a logical and
linear fashion. It has been many decades since the Holocaust yet it sometimes feels
177
very close. As discussed in Chapter 1, trauma theory would suggest that time is
transcended by repetitious and dissociated memories, though this relies on a
problematic view of traumatic memories being unmediated by subjectivity.
Nevertheless, the interval between traumatic event and its representation is a subject of
wide debate. Was 2006 “too soon” after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001
to release the film United 93? Is there an optimum lapse of time that would enable
empathic representations of traumatic events? Could a narrative written now about the
English Civil War achieve the same powerful combination of proximity and distance as
Sebald’s explorations of exile and loss or Foer’s depiction of the doomed search for the
past? If not, what level of personal memory and connection is necessary? How many
“post-”s may be prefixed to memory before it ceases to be worthy of the name? In the
case of the Holocaust, the answer to these questions will only become apparent with
time.
178
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