Introduction: Holocaust representations since 1975

Francesca Haig

Modernism/modernity, Volume 20, Number 1, January 2013, pp. 1-13 (Article)

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Introduction:
Holocaust representations since 1975

Francesca Haig

2014 will mark the seventieth anniversary of the liberation modernism / modernity
of the first Nazi concentration camps at the end of the Second volume twenty,
World War. Far from receding from sight, however, Holocaust number one,
representations continue to pervade the public consciousness, pp 1–13. © 2013
both directly (the website of the United States Holocaust the johns hopkins

Memorial Museum received more than 38 million visitors in university press

20101) and in less obvious ways (the later novels in J. K. Rowl-

ing’s phenomenally successful Harry Potter series draw on Nazi
iconography to depict racial prejudice in the wizarding world).
Historian Dan Stone reminds us of the scope of Holocaust rep-
resentations, describing: Francesca Haig is
Senior Lecturer in
Creative Writing at the
the unfathomably large scholarly literature (by historians, theo-
University of Chester.
logians, sociologists, philosophers, literary theorists, political
She earned her PhD
scientists, social psychologists, educationalists, and others) . . .
from the University
the vast array of representations of the Holocaust produced by
of Melbourne, and has
film-makers, artists, photographers, novelists, poets, musicians,
published articles on
[and] the many and varied attempts to memorialize the Holocaust
topics ranging from
in museums and monuments.2
pseudoscience to
Shakespeare. Her
While its prominent role in cultural, political, and scholarly principal research
forums has remained more or less stable over the decades, the interest is Holocaust
specific ways in which the Holocaust has been represented have fiction. Her poetry
changed. Given the extent and variety of Holocaust representa- appears in various na-
tional and international
tions, it would be reductive to attempt any “summary” of changes
journals; her first col-
since 1975. However, some broad tendencies can be identified.
lection of poetry, Bodies
The six articles here offer a sample of some of the interesting of Water (Five Islands
developments over this period, in literature, film, trauma studies, Press) was published
theology, and historiography. Despite their variety, it is possible in 2006.
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

2 to discern some recurring themes: the transition from eyewitness testimony to more
mediated representations; issues related to depictions of perpetrators; and the prob-
lematic role of empathy in engaging with Holocaust history.

Beyond the first generation

The canonical early Holocaust representations were, unsurprisingly, the accounts

of victims. Survivors’ memoirs such as Primo Levi’s If This is a Man (first published
in 1947 in Italian) and Elie Wiesel’s Night (first published in French in 19583) were
marked by critical and popular acclaim, quickly becoming classics of the nascent genre
of Holocaust literature. Such texts derive much of their impact and popularity from
their function as testimony, a function arguably heightened in accounts by those who
did not survive, such as Anne Frank (whose diary was posthumously published, in
Dutch, in 1947). Although even survivor memoirs can never be entirely unmediated,4
they nonetheless assert the authority of experience; as Wiesel states in Night: “Yes, I
did see this, with my own eyes.”5
This emphasis on experience has determined to a great extent the subsequent trajec-
tory of Holocaust representations. This can be seen most clearly in the transition from
witness accounts to what have become known as “second-generation” accounts, by the
children of Holocaust survivors. Indeed, attention has now turned to “third generation”
accounts, such is the pervasive impact of the Holocaust on the families of its victims.6
Whether such studies will extend into subsequent generations remains to be seen.
The practical, ethical, and aesthetic issues facing the second and subsequent genera-
tions are a heightened version of those facing all non-witness Holocaust representations:
how can we represent a trauma so extreme that it has been seen as inexpressible by
its very nature? Consider the Maus graphic novels, by Art Spiegelman, in which the
author grapples self-reflexively with the difficulties of representing his father’s experi-
ence.7 As Susan Suleiman observes, the resulting emphasis is “not only on the story
that is told but on the context of its telling, its effect and meaning for the one who was
‘not there’ but who is connected to it by familial bonds.”8 Spiegelman’s self-reflexive,
genre-melding text is characteristic of second-generation narratives. The metafictional
prose-poetry of Fugitive Pieces, the lyrical 1996 novel by Anne Michaels (the child of
Holocaust survivors) is equally representative of second-generation Holocaust fiction,
discussed here in Anna Hunter’s article (which also touches on third-generation author,
Jonathan Safran Foer).
Occupying an arguably even more complex position in relation to the Holocaust is
what Susan Suleiman has called the “1.5 generation”: those who survived the Holocaust
as children, “too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening to
them, and sometimes too young to have any memory of it at all.”9 Suleiman notes that
the writing of these survivors is often characterized by “themes of unstable identity
and psychological splitting, a preoccupation with absence, emptiness, silence, a per-
manent sense of loneliness and loss.”10 Raymond Federman, who survived in occupied
France by hiding in a closet as a child while his parents and sisters were taken off to
 Haig / introduction
their deaths, is one such writer. As Derek Alsop writes in his article here, Federman 3
“claimed he was always at a remove” from the Holocaust. Nonetheless, Alsop’s analysis
of Federman’s writing explores the way that this childhood experience suffuses not
only Federman’s creative work, but also the critical writings on Beckett for which he is
perhaps best known. Alsop traces the network of interactions and influences between
Beckett’s and Federman’s work, showing how Federman’s writing can be traced back
to that pivotal yet unspeakable moment in the closet.

Postmodernism and the Holocaust

Realism tended to be the dominant mode of Holocaust survivors’ accounts; as James

E. Young observes, “Holocaust writers and critics have assumed that the more realistic
a representation, the more adequate it becomes as testimonial evidence of outrageous
events.”11 However, those representations that fall outside the frame of testimony have
tended to eschew realism in favour of a postmodern self-reflexivity. Federman, strad-
dling fiction and testimony, is best known as a postmodern writer (although, as Alsop
notes, Federman rejected the term) and epitomizes the postmodern preoccupation with
history as mediated, fragmented, and elusive—ideas prominent in many Holocaust texts.
Yet we should be careful in how we formulate the relationship between postmodern-
ism and the Holocaust; to say that Holocaust representations merely lend themselves to
postmodern critiques is too simplistic, while it is equally misleading to describe these
representations as responding to postmodernism. The development of postmodern
thought can be traced back to a number of the twentieth century’s great traumas;
as well as the Holocaust, the impact of two world wars and the atomic bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki must be taken into account. These traumas, in which “the
progressive optimism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries . . . met the dark re-
alities of the twentieth,” cast into doubt the grand narratives of religion, technological
progress, and emancipation that had framed European thought up until that point.12
The Holocaust, therefore, in part inaugurated the postmodern, which still struggles
to articulate it. Robert Eaglestone, in his indispensable 2004 study The Holocaust and
the Postmodern, expresses the intricate relationship between postmodernism and the
Holocaust, describing “the circular process by which postmodern thought is shaped
explicitly or implicitly by the Holocaust and how it engages with and shapes how we
understand the Holocaust.”13
In keeping with the concerns of postmodernism, the limitations of language in the
face of the Holocaust have been widely addressed, as in Primo Levi’s well-known state-
ment in If This is a Man: “If the Lagers [camps] had lasted longer a new, harsh language
would have been born.”14 It is not surprising, therefore, that Holocaust representations
have often employed visual media. Of particular relevance to the Holocaust is the per-
ceived “evidential” quality of photographic images. Indeed, who can deny the impact
of the now-iconic black and white photographs of emaciated survivors, or of the piles
of dead victims? Film footage can convey a similar documentary impact. Consider the
recent flurry of excitement over the film footage showing Anne Frank in 1941; viewed
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

4 more than three million times since its release to YouTube in 2009, the footage offers
viewers a “living” glimpse of the figure so well-known through her diaries.15
However, it is equally unsurprising that those who attempt to depict the Holocaust
through visual media find themselves facing many of the same representational difficul-
ties as writers; it would be reductive to interpret Levi’s critique of “language” as being
literally limited to language, or indeed to assume that Adorno’s famous interdiction
against poetry (“after Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric”) refers only to poetry.16
Indeed, no medium is exempt from the representational challenges of the Holocaust;
historian Raul Hilberg even asks himself: “if the statement is true, then is it not equally
barbaric to write footnotes after Auschwitz?”17 Filmic representations of the Holocaust
since 1975 have grappled with these representational issues in widely varying ways,
from Claude Lanzmann’s epic, painstakingly self-reflexive 1985 documentary Shoah,
to the slick sincerity of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List (an adaptation of
Thomas Keneally’s 1982 novel, Schindler’s Ark).
Peter Wagstaff’s article here discusses Georges Perec’s documentary film (with
Robert Bober) Récits d’Ellis Island: histoires d’errance et d’espoir [Ellis Island: Tales of
Vagrancy and Hope], released (in two parts) in 1980 and 1981. Perec, like Federman,
is a member of the 1.5 generation, and, like Federman, resists categorization; Wagstaff
observes that Perec’s work “frustrat[es] any attempt at categorization by verbal or visual
genre, by theme or mode of expression.” Of particular interest in Récits d’Ellis Island is
the interplay not only of word and film, but of word and still image. As Wagstaff notes,
this relationship evokes the interplay between words and images in the writing of W.
G. Sebald, another of the great writers of the Holocaust. Perec’s foregrounding of the
complex narrative workings of film, still photography, and text allows him to achieve
what Wagstaff describes as “destabilization of narrative truth value through the interplay
of word and image.” In contrast with the realism of many canonical survivor memoirs,
Perec incorporates still photographs into the film format in a way that “makes evident
the gap between the historical subject and the narrating present.” In the years follow-
ing Wiesel’s “Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes,” representations such as Perec’s
foreground absence rather than presence, uncertainty rather than certainty.

Empathy and identification

As the number of eyewitnesses to the Holocaust decreases, artists, writers, histori-

ans, and curators have struggled to find the most appropriate mode to engage with an
event that is receding rapidly into the past. Several articles here note the importance
currently assigned to empathy; in recent decades, it has become the privileged mode
of engaging with the Holocaust. As Dominick LaCapra notes, “empathy is important
in attempting to understand traumatic events and victims.”18 But empathy and identi-
fication can be privileged at the expense of critical, historical, or ethical rigor. Andrew
Gross and Michael Hoffman, for example, express concern that “when authority is
linked to affect, the prescribed reader response is sympathy or personal identification
rather than criticism.”19
 Haig / introduction
Sally Miller’s article here considers the role of empathy in trauma studies, noting 5
that for subsequent generations “empathic identification with the victim” has been “the
pre-eminent means of approaching and understanding the Holocaust.” In examining
the role of the “secondary witness,” Miller explores the psychoanalytic role of fantasy,
and the relationship between testimony and witness, to consider the problematic na-
ture of such empathy. In particular, she addresses the (dis)function of empathy in the
discredited Holocaust memoir, Fragments, by Binjamin Wilkomirski. Fragments was
first published in 1995, to general acclaim, before it was exposed in 1999 as a work of
fiction, whose author (real name Bruno Dössekker, born Bruno Grosjean) had in fact
been in neither the ghettos nor the death camps. Dössekker had been obsessed with
the Holocaust, and it is thought that he had transposed his own traumatic childhood
on to the experience of Holocaust victims.
The real significance of the Fragments controversy is what it reveals about the
broader role of empathy in Holocaust representations; as Miller notes, Dössekker’s
delusion is in many ways merely the logical extension of the emphasis on empathy and
identification in contemporary engagement with the Holocaust. Gross and Hoffman
state:

it is easy to dismiss Wilkomirski as someone whose personal suffering has led him to
over-identify with victims of the Holocaust, but in the victim culture [of the US], this is
just what he is supposed to do.20

While the emphasis on identification and empathy is problematic, it is worth asking

what alternatives are available. Postmodern criticism has made any aspiration towards
objective, empirical engagement with the Holocaust at least problematic. But even
if we set aside these ideological, theoretical concerns, a very real and very practical
impediment remains. The sheer volume of material on the Holocaust makes it impos-
sible for scholars to achieve the mastery of all relevant material that the empiricist
ideal requires.21 It is difficult to imagine how any single scholar (even the ideal polyglot
scholar advocated by Snyder, below) could read all the available material in one lifetime.
Given this, the rise of empathetic engagement with the Holocaust is less surprising,
though no less contentious.
Anna Hunter’s article here also addresses the issue of affect and empathy, focus-
ing on the way that Holocaust narratives have tended to ossify, often conforming to a
generic “Holocaust story.” She argues that “within cultural memory of the twentieth
century, the Holocaust itself may have become a form of dark fairy-tale.” In place of
the narratorial authority of survivor testimony, Hunter outlines how these texts draw
on fairy-tale tropes as a means of coming to grips with the Holocaust narrative by em-
ploying “a narrative frame that fits with our mode of understanding.” We see this at its
most exaggerated in John Boyne’s 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, adapted
into a film in 2008 by Mark Herman. Both book and film versions are intensely mov-
ing, but exemplify (in their troubling historical inaccuracies) Hunter’s point that such
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

6 texts sometimes “rely . . . upon the conveyance of sensation rather than historical fact
in order to engage the reader with the event.” In the case of The Boy in the Striped
Pyjamas, not only is historical accuracy entirely abandoned (among other inaccuracies,
the protagonist is able to slide under the unguarded and unelectrified camp fence22),
but the empathy that the story evokes is displaced from Jewish Holocaust victims to
the family of a Nazi commandant.
The issue of representing Holocaust perpetrators is perpetually controversial. Stone
asserts that “in understanding any case of genocide our most urgent task as historians
is to try to understand those who carried it out.”23 If this imperative extends beyond
historians to others who would represent the Holocaust, then the current privileging of
empathy and identification is a troubling obstacle to serious consideration of Holocaust
perpetrators. As historian and critic Inga Clendinnen observes, if identification is the
principle mode of engaging with history, then brutal or traumatic histories such as
the Holocaust present a problem: when considering the perpetrators, “identification,
the only route to understanding, is closed.”24 But, as Miller shows in her discussion of
trauma theory in relation to Bernard Schlink’s The Reader, literature offers the capacity
to encourage a wide range of identifications. The Reader “mobilizes identification with
both victims and perpetrators so that throughout the novel we are asked to acknowledge
that empathy can accommodate guilt as well as innocence.” David Tollerton takes a
different approach to a similar problem: how to account for the Holocaust without
excusing those who perpretated it. He explores Frank Cottrell Boyce’s 2008 television
drama, God on Trial. While Tollerton addresses theological debates arising from the
Holocaust, he also makes the point that debates about the culpability of God can tend
to elide discussions of human culpability.
Debates about the role of affect and empathy have also played a significant part in
the museology of the Holocaust. As James E. Young observes, “the ‘experiential mode’
has come into increasing favor by museums.”25 An often-cited example of this tendency
to engage visitors via identification is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
(USHMM) in Washington, opened in 1993 (the same year that Young published the
seminal study of Holocaust monuments and museums, The Texture of Memory: Holo-
caust Memorials and Meaning26). Visitors to the museum are issued with “identity cards”
with details of a person who suffered persecution under Nazi rule. As visitors progress
through the exhibit, they can find more information about the fate of the individual on
their card. The museum states that “the cards help visitors to personalize the historical
events of the time.”27 However, the idea that “personalization” is necessarily the best way
of engaging with the Holocaust is problematic. Young states of the USHMM that this
attempt to enable visitors to “see it all through the victim’s eyes” in fact “obscures the
contemporary reality of the Holocaust, which is not the event itself, but memory of the
event, the great distance between then and now, there and here.”28 While postmodern
Holocaust representations highlight this “great distance,” the reliance on empathy in
other modes of Holocaust representation seeks to elide this gulf.
 Haig / introduction
Holocaust historiography 7

“History” and “fiction” have traditionally been viewed as dichotomous, and in the
contentious field of Holocaust studies this distinction has been perceived as particularly
significant. Historian and theorist Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, for example, famously ex-
pressed his concern that the image of the Holocaust “is being shaped, not at the histo-
rian’s anvil, but in the novelist’s crucible.”29 Postmodern thought has, of course, blurred
the distinction between the two, with theorists such as Hayden White and Dominick
LaCapra arguing against the concept of objectivity or transparency in any narrative,
literary, historical, or otherwise.30 While the distinction between Holocaust history and
other representations can hardly be said to have eroded entirely, the complementarity
between the two is apparent in the overlap between Timothy Snyder’s article here on
Holocaust historiography, and several of the others included in this issue.
Snyder critiques the reductive tendency of historians and theorists to latch on to
the simplest explanations for the Holocaust; in this sense, his point is a historiographic
rendering of that made by Anna Hunter in her discussion of contemporary Holocaust
novels, which, she says, offer us ways to “read the Holocaust within a narrative frame
that fits with our mode of understanding.” Snyder, however, focuses in particular on
commemoration, and the tendency to conflate commemoration with historical under-
standing.

[O]urs is an age of memory rather than history. Commemoration requires no adequate

explanation of the catastrophe, only an aesthetically realizable image of its victims. As
cultures of memory supplant concern for history, the danger is that historians will find
themselves drawn to explanations that are the simplest to convey.

Dan Stone, among others, has bemoaned the rise of “memory culture” derived from the
Holocaust,31 but it is noteworthy that those working in other disciplines of Holocaust
studies have also identified the same tendency. For example, literary and cultural critics
Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone also caution that “to appeal to memory
over history can imply the displacing of analysis by empathy, of politics by sentiment.”32
Snyder’s own work is part of this same reassessment of Holocaust truisms, which
are “aesthetically convenient” but often reductive, if not simply incorrect. Whereas
Auschwitz has become a metonym for the Holocaust, Snyder’s 2010 book Bloodlands:
Europe between Hitler and Stalin argues persuasively that the popular conflation of the
Holocaust with the concentration camps misrepresents the reality. If, as Ruth Franklin
notes, “Auschwitz is no longer just a place but a shorthand for the Holocaust,” then
it is a shorthand based on a misconception of the historical reality of the Holocaust.33
Snyder states: “the horror of the twentieth century is thought to be located in the camps.
But the concentration camps are not where most of the victims of National Socialism
and Stalinism died.”34 Instead, Snyder focuses on the “bloodlands” (by his definition,
extending from central Poland to western Russia), where fourteen million were killed
by the Stalinist and Nazi regimes between 1933 and 1945.
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

8 This kind of reassessment is characteristic of Holocaust historiography as it has

evolved over the decades, shifting from attempts to construct a sweeping account of
the Holocaust to a focus on the intricacies and complexities of the many factors at play.
Canonical texts of the initial period tend to be monumental accounts, such as Raul
Hilberg’s The Destruction of European Jews (first published in 1961; reissued in a new,
three-volume edition in 1985), and aspire to provide a comprehensive account of the
Holocaust. Michael R. Marrus (whose seminal 1987 study of Holocaust historiography,
The Holocaust in History, is an indispensable guide to the first four decades of Holocaust
historiography) observes how this totalizing tendency has dissipated in recent decades,
as historians now “spend much of their time pointing to variety, paradoxes, complexi-
ties, and contradictions. Their writing is less informed by single, unitary perspectives
than it was with their predecessors.”35
This shift can in part be attributed to the newfound access historians have had, since
1989, to previously inaccessible archives in former communist countries. In his Histo-
ries of the Holocaust, Dan Stone provides an excellent survey of developments since
1980, noting that “since the end of the Cold War, the historiography of the Holocaust
has grown exponentially.”36 However, as Snyder notes in his article here, many western
historians have failed to take advantage of these local accounts (in local languages)
from the countries under Nazi and Soviet rule. The myopic focus on German-language
sources has persisted, despite the fact that, as Snyder points out, “Some 97% of the
victims of the Holocaust did not speak the German language.”
For a significant period, the defining debate within Holocaust historiography was
between intentionalists (who saw the Holocaust as the implementation of a clear plan
by Hitler) and structuralists (who argued that the Holocaust was more complex and
multiple in its origins, and that its development was often opportunistic and ad hoc).
The dispute was “a classic historiographical clash between those who see the world as
driven by agency, and who therefore stress the role of individuals, and those who see
social forces and structures as more important.”37 This “clash” had settled down by
the early 1990s (although the opening of archives in formerly communist countries,
which provided new insights into local factors, briefly reignited the debate) and, as
Stone notes, “there are now very few historians who would take either an extreme
intentionalist or an extreme functionalist position.”38
The most significant and contentious historiographical development in recent dec-
ades has been the increasingly pronounced attempt to situate the Holocaust within a
wider context of historical genocides. The “uniqueness” of the Holocaust has, for a long
time, assumed a deified status in Holocaust studies, and has been passionately defended
by historians and philosophers.39 But this concept has increasingly been contested as
developments in postcolonial theory have drawn attention to a powerful Eurocentric
historical bias that has neglected historical traumas that lay beyond its view. Donald
Bloxham puts it bluntly: “the truth is that most other genocides have been of insufficient
interest to Western intellectuals for them to ponder their metaphysical dimensions in the
way the Holocaust has been pondered.”40 Though this has now changed, the transition
has been controversial. In 2000, Alan S. Rosenbaum edited Is the Holocaust Unique?
 Haig / introduction
Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, a collection of essays deemed so inflammatory 9
that even the foreword, by Israel W. Charny, registers disquiet along with its praise: “I
am stunned and upset by this book and very grateful to its editor, Alan S. Rosenbaum,
for creating it.”41 Charny goes on to argue that the collection contains several chapters
whose only value is to illustrate the difficulty of the issues at stake.
Despite the heightened rhetoric surrounding the issue of comparative genocide, the
question of the Holocaust’s uniqueness (or otherwise) has become a consistent feature
in Holocaust historiography as it has progressed from documenting the Holocaust to
attempting to situate it in its broader historical context. Recent texts, such as Bloxham’s
excellent The Final Solution: A Genocide (2009), demonstrate the extent to which this
contextualization has become a standard element of Holocaust historiography. Bloxham
argues that “uniqueness is not susceptible to proof by agreed means of testing.”42 As
Stone states, “the claim that the Holocaust is ‘unique’ is one that for some time has
been indefensible in academic circles.”43

Holocaust (im)piety

In 1987 Terence Des Pres included the Holocaust’s “uniqueness” as one of three
“prescriptions” delineating “respectable” ways of representing the Holocaust; the other
two prescriptions were that such representations should be “as accurate and faithful
as possible to the facts and conditions of the event” and that the Holocaust should
be “approached as a solemn or even a sacred event, with a seriousness admitting no
response that might obscure its enormity or dishonour its dead.”44 As Des Pres himself
acknowledged, in his article “Holocaust Laughter,” all three of these prescriptions have
found themselves undermined in recent decades.
In her 1996 book, Mourning becomes the Law, Gillian Rose coins the term “Holo-
caust piety” in a discussion of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Claims for the “ineffability”
of the Holocaust are mobilized, she argues, to aid in the construction of sacralized,
oblique representations that “protect us from understanding” or engaging with the
Holocaust experience in its complexity.

To argue for silence, prayer, the banishment equally of poetry and knowledge . . . is to
mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too under-
standable, all too continuous with what we are—human, all too human.45

While reverential texts such as Schindler’s List continue to proliferate, the concept of
the Holocaust’s sanctity has increasingly been challenged by representations ranging
from the irreverent to the obscene. Matthew Boswell’s 2011 book, Holocaust Impiety
in Literature, Film and Music, gives examples such as the song “Belsen was a Gas,”
written by Sid Vicious in 1976, and Jonathan Littell’s 2006 novel Les Bienveillantes
(published in English as The Kindly Ones in 2009), as well as other, earlier examples
(including Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”, written in 1962).46 Littell’s recent novel, which was
greeted with both outrage and acclaim, is a useful example of the shift away from Ho-
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

10 locaust piety. It is a novel of deliberately hyperbolic depravity that combines historical

detail with sexual fantasy; its protagonist, an SS officer, not only takes part in the mass
murder of Jews, but also sodomizes himself with a tree branch and has an affair with
his sister. It is a striking example both of Holocaust impiety and of the challenges of
representing the perpetrators.
There is no doubt that “pious” texts continue to proliferate. The comic elements
of Roberto Benigni’s 1997 film Life is Beautiful may have shocked some, but the film
sticks firmly to the tenet of redemption central to Holocaust piety, as does Boyne’s
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. At the same time, however, such piety is increasingly
coming under scrutiny. The New York Institute for the Humanities recently organized a
symposium called “Second thoughts on the Memory Industry,” an event that epitomizes
this interrogation of Holocaust piety. The symposium’s advertising material noted that
“memory and the memorializing impulse have become increasingly reified, stylized,
fetishized, and instrumentalized, hijacked and ossified into simply so many more
bludgeons and pickaxes in the various rhetorical wars of grievance against grievance.”
Areas to be addressed included “Trauma envy, genocide Olympics, memory fatigue,
trauma tourism.”47 While the symposium was not restricted to the Holocaust (it cited
9/11 as another example), the selection of speakers (Art Spiegelman, Marianne Hirsch,
and James E. Young, all well-known for their writings on the Holocaust) demonstrates
that the Holocaust is seen as central to this “memory industry.”

Conclusion

While the decades since 1975 display a sometimes bewildering range of Holocaust
representations, the Holocaust has shown no signs of retreating from its prominent
position in both popular and critical consciousness. But its representations seem to be
moving in two opposing directions. On the one hand, empathy and identification are
firmly ensconced as the preferred popular modes of engagement, perpetuating depic-
tions of the Holocaust as both sacred and unique. On the other hand, the increasing
tendency towards “impiety,” and a micro-focus on specific aspects of the Holocaust,
are interrogating and deconstructing the very narratives that continue to proliferate.
While postmodern texts emphasize the Holocaust’s ineffability, and the gulf between
experience and representation, other texts attempt to elide that gulf through an em-
phasis on empathy and identification.
The articles gathered here demonstrate that while there seems to be no danger of the
Holocaust being forgotten, it is worth asking at what cost this “commemoration” takes
place. The saccharine palatability of texts like Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
may represent a more insidious threat to Holocaust memory than Littell’s scatological
and confrontational The Kindly Ones. Similarly, the challenges being mounted against
the doctrine of Holocaust “uniqueness” may prove more healthy than harmful in this
respect. For the very ubiquity of the Holocaust in western culture may be due to re-
ductive representations (historical, literary, or political) in which the specificity of the
Holocaust continues to ossify into an easily-accessible icon.
 Haig / introduction
Notes 11
1. “Press Kit—Facts and Figures,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed Jan 9,
2012, http://www.ushmm.org/museum/press/kits/details.php?content=99-general#facts.
2. Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5.
3. This was an adaptation of a much longer Yiddish version, Un di Velt Hot Gesvign (And the World
Remained Silent) published in 1956. For an illuminating discussion of the different versions of the
text, see Ruth Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses: Truth and Lies in Holocaust Fiction (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 69–87.
4. See Lawrence Langer, “Interpreting Survivor Testimony,” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed.
Berel Lang (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 26–40.
5. Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. Marion Wiesel (London: Penguin, 2006), 32.
6. See, for example, Philippe Codde, “Transmitted Holocaust Trauma: A Matter of Myth and
Fairy Tales?” European Judaism 42, no. 1, (2009): 62–75; Gabriele Rosenthal, ed., The Holocaust in
Three Generations: Families of Victims and Perpetrators of the Nazi Regime (Oplagen and Farming-
ton Hills, MI: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2010); and Dominick A. Iorio, Richard L. Libowitz, and
Marcia S. Littell, eds., The Holocaust: Lessons for the Third Generation (Maryland: University Press
of America, 1996).
7. Although a three-page version appeared in 1972 (before the period addressed in this journal
issue), the first volume was serialised in RAW magazine from 1980, appearing in its complete form
(My Father Bleeds History) in 1986, followed in 1991 by Volume II (And Here My Troubles Began).
Since 1996 they have been available as a single volume: Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus (Lon-
don: Penguin, 2003).
8. Susan Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2006), 179.
9. Suleiman, Crises, 179.
10. Suleiman, Crises, 184.
11. James E. Young, Writing and Re-Writing the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of
Interpretation (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 17.
12. Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind (London: Pimlico, 2000), 389.
13. Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (New York: Oxford University Press,
2008), 12.
14. Primo Levi, If This is a Man and The Truce (London: Abacus, 1991), 129.
15. This footage is available on YouTube courtesy of The Anne Frank House. “Anne Frank: the
Only Existing Film Images,” accessed 1st March 2012, http://youtu.be/4hvtXuO5GzU.
16. Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society” in Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philo-
sophical Reader, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber Nicholson, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2003), 146–62, 162. Indeed, Adorno has discussed the topic with arguably greater elo-
quence in relation to other art forms, including music. In a discussion of Arnold Schoenberg’s musical
composition, A survivor from Warsaw, Adorno observes:
the so-called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of those who were beaten down with
rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from it.
(Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” in Notes to Literature — Volume Two, trans. Shierry Weber
Nicholsen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann [New York: Columbia University Press, 1992], 76–94, 88.)
Nonetheless, Adorno’s famous interdiction of poetry remains the best known critique of the aesthetic
as a response to historical trauma. The singling out of this soundbite, however, belies the complex-
ity of Adorno’s engagement with this issue. Subsequent writings reveal Adorno’s ongoing attempt to
come to terms with the difficulties of reconciling the aesthetic with the (tragically) historic; on the
one hand, he maintains that “Auschwitz demonstrated irrefutably that culture has failed” (Theodor
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton [New York: Seabury, 1973], 366). However, in the
midst of his critique of this “failed” culture, Adorno still asserts that such representation is an ethical
imperative: “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream”
(Negative Dialectics, 362).
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

12 17. Raul Hilberg, “I Was Not There,” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York:
Holmes & Meier, 1988), 17–25, 25.
18. Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry 25.4 (1999): 696–727, 723.
19. Andrew S. Gross and Michael J. Hoffman, “Memory, Authority, and Identity: Holocaust Studies
in Light of the Wilkomirski Debate,” Biography 27.1 (2004): 25–47, 34.
20. Gross and Hoffman, “Memory, Authority, and Identity”, 34.
21. Robert Eaglestone, “Keynote Lecture” (paper presented at “The Holocaust Since 1975” con-
ference, the University of Chester, September 18, 2009).
22. John Boyne, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (London: David Fickling Books, 2008), 206.
Boyne’s claim that the novel is “a fable” (the book’s initial sub-title) feels disingenuous, given the many
clear indicators of its Holocaust specificity, most glaringly the coy rendering of Auschwitz throughout
as “Out-With.”
23. Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, 5.
24. Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Melbourne: Text, 2000), 104.
25. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, ) 344.
26. Young, The Texture of Memory.
27. “Division of Education: Resources for the Classroom—Identification Cards,” United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed March 27, 2012, http://www.ushmm.org/education/foredu-
cators/story/.
28. Young, The Texture of Memory, 344. For an interesting recent discussion of Holocaust museol-
ogy, see also “Representing the Unrepresentable,” ed. Rainer Schulze, a special issue of The Holocaust
in History and Memory, vol. 1 (2008).
29. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zhakor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1982), 98.
30. See, for example, Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Hayden White, “Historical
Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the
“Final Solution”, ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 37–53;
and Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). For a
fascination discussion of the relationship between history and fiction in Holocaust texts, see James
E. Young, Writing and Re-Writing the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988).
31. Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, 10.
32. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, introduction to Contested Pasts: The Politics of
Memory, ed. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (London: Routledge, 2003), 1–21, 8.
33. Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses, 71.
34. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands (New York: Basic Books, 2010), xi–xiii.
35. Michael R. Marrus, “Reflections on the Historiography of the Holocaust,” The Journal of
Modern History, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Mar., 1994): 92–116, 93.
36. Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, 82.
37. Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, 69.
38. Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, 71.
39. See, for example, Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context: Holocaust and Mass
Death Before the Modern Age, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
40. Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009),
318.
41. Israel W. Charny, foreword to Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide,
3rd edition, ed. Alan S. Rosenbaum, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2009) ix–xv, ix.
42. Bloxham, The Final Solution, 317.
43. Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, 8.
44. Terrence Des Pres, “Holocaust Laughter,” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New
York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 216–233, 217.
 Haig / introduction
45. Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 43. 13
46. Matthew Boswell, Holocaust Impeity in Literature, Popular Music and Film (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
47. “Second Thoughts on the Memory Industry—A Symposium,” accessed May 6, 2011, http://
nyihumanities.org/event/second-thoughts-on-the-memory-industry-a-symposium