Postcards from Auschwitz. Daniel P. Reynolds

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СКАЧАТЬ accounts by survivors, perpetrators, and other eyewitnesses promise their readers some degree of immediacy or affective connection to the disaster that dispassionate histories cannot.81 Given the fallibility of human memory, historians are suspicious of the ability of testimony to enrich our factual knowledge about the Nazi genocide. Testimonial accounts nevertheless engage their readers on both a visceral and a metaphysical level, involving them emotionally and intellectually in profoundly troubling considerations about humanity and violence. Tourism draws on the power of such testimony to heighten the sense of immediacy that being there promises.82 Survivor testimonies ask their audiences to listen carefully, to hear not only the account of the past but also the urgency and the struggle inherent in the survivor’s struggle to render the account in words.83 Readers are the audience that survivors require if their testimony is to be received, thus fulfilling the task of bearing witness.

      But the intersubjectivity demanded of witnessing emerges as a critical problem in the reception of survivor testimony, some of which draws rather pessimistic conclusions about the adequacy of language to communicate a survivor’s traumatic experiences. If such pessimism has a common origin, it may lie in the survivor accounts themselves. Whether they are Elie Wiesel’s Night, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz (also published as If This Is a Man), or any other testament to the ordeal of the Holocaust, survivor accounts typically express the need to remember, and, at the same time, they lament the hurdles to transmitting memories through language. In survivor testimony, witnessing is framed as obligation and impossibility, a Sisyphean task that can never be achieved adequately. We see this predicament in the preface to Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, where the author identifies a gap between his need to speak and his ability to provide a complete account:

      I recognize, and ask indulgence for, the structural defects of the book. Its origins go back, not indeed in practice, but as an idea, an intention, to the days in the Lager. The need to tell our story to “the rest,” to make “the rest” participate in it, had taken on for us, before our liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with our other elementary needs. The book has been written to satisfy this need: first and foremost, therefore, as an interior liberation. Hence its fragmentary character: the chapters have been written not in logical succession, but in order of urgency.84

      Levi makes plain for his reader the therapeutic necessity of convincing “the rest”—which comes to encompass future generations as much as contemporaries who did not experience the camp—even at the expense of a logical progression. The fragmentary account cannot claim even to render Levi’s own experiences exhaustively, suggesting that the experience of Auschwitz itself resists any logically ordered or complete representation; instead, Levi’s need to bear witness appears as a “violent impulse.”

      Like Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel names a painful gap between the experience of the camp and its representation in testimony. Addressing the urgency to bear witness, Wiesel speaks of writing his testimony itself as a form of trauma, wondering if he composed Night “so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind.”85 Wiesel goes on to identify language as the chief barrier to providing a full account:

      Convinced that this period in history would be judged one day, I knew that I must bear witness. I also knew that, while I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language.… I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right. But what exactly was “it”? “It” was something elusive, darkly shrouded for fear of being usurped, profaned. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless.86

      Wiesel bemoans the inadequacy of language to convey what he and others experienced, and in doing so he negates his own testimony’s capacity to convey his experiences to others:

      Deep down, the witness knew then, as he does now, that his testimony would not be received. After all, it deals with an event that sprang from the darkest zone of man. Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know.87

      For Wiesel, the obligation to bear witness becomes itself a kind of trauma because it seems doomed to fail. Wiesel registers this double traumatization not only through expressions of helplessness but in the very representation of his own consciousness as split. To underscore the impossibility of transferring knowledge through testimony, Wiesel portrays a disjuncture between the narrator of this passage and the younger self who wrote Night, referring to himself not as “I” but in the third person (something Wiesel does with some regularity in his prose). And yet that double traumatization mirrors the double articulation of bearing witness—Wiesel must become his own listener, since only one who has experienced what he did can receive his message.88

      The prevalence of trauma as a category for approaching Holocaust survivor testimony suggests that tourism, to the extent it relays the experiences of camp prisoners, must overcome the same inadequacies of communication. Trauma theorists posit a breach between the survivors’ experience, one the one hand, and their ability to convey that experience coherently to those who were not there, on the other. This breach is often expressed in terms of the Holocaust’s unspeakability or its incomprehensibility. Dori Laub, a psychoanalyst and himself a Holocaust survivor, likens the Holocaust testimonial’s survivor/reader relationship to patient/analyst relationship in trauma therapy. In laying out a psychoanalytic framework for thinking about survivor testimony, Laub describes a communicative structure involving a wounded speaker and a sympathetic listener. The project of remembering is fraught, and so the patient and therapist must work together to confront a past that seems to elude comprehension even by those who experienced it.89 In fact, Laub advances the incomprehensibility theory one step further, arguing that the Holocaust was an event without witnesses, an alarming notion he introduces as a “theoretical perspective” meant to explain the unique aspect of the trauma experienced by the Nazis’ victims. Laub claims that “what made a Holocaust out of the event is the unique way in which, during its historical occurrence, the event produced no witnesses. Not only, in effect, did the Nazis try to exterminate the physical witnesses of their crime; but the inherently incomprehensible and deceptive psychological structure of the event precluded its own witnessing, even by its very victims.”90 The unfamiliarity of the event was so radical, in others words, that the ability of the human mind to observe and remember was hopelessly compromised.

      In response to the trope of incomprehensibility that accompanies so much thought about survivor testimony, the work of the Judaic and literary studies scholar Gary Weissman offers a useful intervention. Countering Wiesel’s contention that only those who experienced the Holocaust directly can understand it, Weissman suggests that “perhaps just the opposite is the case; perhaps because it is a historical concept comprising myriad events which no one person experienced directly, the Holocaust can only be understood historically.”91 That is, if it is the case that the Holocaust lies beyond the witness’s ability to relate testimony in a comprehensive and coherent manner, then it is up to the listener to put that testimony into a historical, explanatory context that reaches beyond the experiences of the individual survivor. Weissman distinguishes between the Holocaust as the individual experiences of all those caught up in it and the Holocaust as an event with discernible components that can be learned as a set of facts: “The Holocaust and a survivor’s Holocaust experience constitute related but distinct objects of knowledge. It is one thing to understand the antecedent conditions of the Holocaust … and quite another to understand ‘what it was like’ to live and die at Auschwitz-Birkenau or in the Warsaw ghetto.”92 The trope of incomprehensibility encountered in so much survivor testimony and its reception makes the mistake of conflating these two objects of knowledge. To know the experience of another person as though one experienced it oneself may be impossible no matter how harmless the event. But as Weissman points out, it is perhaps that cognitive distance that creates an opportunity for a different kind of knowledge, one that he calls “historical.”

      Weissman’s СКАЧАТЬ