What shall I take to witness for thee? What shall I liken to thee, O daughter of Jerusalem? What shall I equal to thee, that I may comfort thee?
Lamentations, 2:13

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty pointed the way to a Utopia: a Utopia at once post-metaphysical, and liberal.[1] The trick was for us to learn to recognize that people physically and culturally remote from us were moral realities too, as worthy of our compassion and our regard as our own kin and kind. Once educated in "the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers," we would be readier to count the costs of our own gratification, and to temper our quests for autonomy and abundance.

Rorty entrusted the central task of extending the reach of the moral imagination to "genres such as ethnography, the journalist's report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel." A couple of sentences on he added film, recognizing that novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral challenge and progress."[2] History was, rather pointedly, excluded.

The exclusion rankles, at least with this historian.[3] Rorty's identification of fiction and film as the prime educators of the popular imagination is obviously justified, especially if we allow that the effects may be ephemeral or unpredictable, and will always largely elude measurement and analysis. My interest here is with one great process of public suffering which has been notoriously difficult to represent, whether in film or in the various forms of literature whose end is art. I mean, of course, the Holocaust. (I exclude here that highly complex genre of recalled memory, the witness testimony, which requires separate discussion.)

The poetry which came out in the course of the decade following the First World War distilled and certified a transformation in a generation's understanding of what war, peace, and politics mean. No comparable distillation of meanings has come out of the Holocaust, now fifty years gone. It continues to defy assimilation. Even piecemeal appropriations typically fail. In her last and unarguably her finest poems, Sylvia Plath tried to tap the power of Nazi and concentration-camp imagery to convey her personal sense of dread, isolation, and betrayal, as in these lines from "Daddy":

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I begin to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.


 
The response was general consternation, followed by general rebuke. (There was no equivalent critical reaction to the line from "Fever 103°": "Like Hiroshima ash eating in.") Artists often play with fire, but this incandescence seemed to carry with it the whiff of actual burning flesh. Even admirers acknowledged that Plath's attempt to marry her personal psychological afflictions to such grossly incommensurate sufferings imploded the delicately-built structures of her art.[4]

When D. M. Thomas chose the mass shootings at Babi Yar as pivot and dramatic denouement of his long, fraught, and intricately-worked novel The White Hotel, and despite his attempt to invoke both authenticity and acceptance by the reproduction of the words of one of the few survivors of that most barbarous massacre, the effect was immediate: the queasy trivialization not of the events, but of the writing which sought to exploit them. The extraordinary coda, which involved the revivification and reunion in a heavenly "Israel" of people we had seen murdered, only compounded catastrophe.

I am not concerned to criticize Plath and Thomas here. What interests me is the inversion effect. Normally we expect the magic of art to intensify, transfigure, and elevate actuality. Touch the Holocaust, and the flow is reversed. That matter is so potent in itself that when art seeks to command it, it is art which is rendered vacuous and drained of authority.

The most effective imagined evocations of the Holocaust seem to proceed either by invocation, the glancing reference to an existing bank of ideas, images, and sentiments, or, perhaps more effectively, by indirection. Martin Amis in Time's Arrow conjures Auschwitz skimmingly through the swift manipulation of familiar clusters of icons. The pathos of Anne Frank's diary derives not from the words before us (which are in fact rather chirpy, as we might expect from so resolute and resilient a young woman) but from our knowledge of what is to come. The horrors in Aharon Appelfeld's supremely laconic novels are always extratextual, or at the least offstage.[5] What makes Toni, the central figure in Appelfeld's To the Land of the Reeds, so moving, and our anxiety for her so painful, is that she is innocent: so endearingly trivial in her vanities and foibles, so incapable of imagining the unimaginable fate which is being prepared for her. The standard iconography is all there—the winter coat, the hastily-gathered possessions, the docile, even eager traveling toward an increasingly problematic destination—but she has no notion (no more notion than we would have) of what is to come.

We do not see her lose her innocence; when the trap springs she is already gone from our sight. We do not see her climbing into the boxcar, or stumbling on the ramp. Instead, we flick to the Identikit image of "the Holocaust" we carry in our heads—and are relieved at that point from the terrible burden of specific, systematic imaginings. (Contrast this with those survivors brusquely separated from their kin, and left with an unendurable array of unendurable alternative scenarios to think through.) Appelfeld's technique is superbly effective in rousing our imaginative sympathies, but essentially it still draws on existing capital. However much it may enlighten us as to the condition of the victims in the process of becoming victims (and it does), it does not challenge and expand imagination with a representation of the Holocaust in process. Rather, it points to a pre-existing array of emotions, and activates them.

Dan Pagis, as great a poet as Appelfeld is a novelist, employs a technique not of indirection, but of misdirection: the bodily assumption of the actual into the mythic. This is most perfectly effected in the small poem he titles "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car":

here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him that i[6]

In this carload, Eve. There is no strain in the coupling of the biblical reference and the apparently commonplace railway-car, because the title has already catapulted us into the archetypal world of "The Holocaust." Pagis does not seek to tame the tiger. He rides it. We do not need the vaulting pole of imagination to leap the gap between the actual and the figurative, because there is no gap to leap: we are already in the icy uplands and infernal gullies of myth. The intricate detail of particular human suffering is left far behind.

That same mythic potency has come to suffuse normally banal words—"Oven." "Chimney." "Smoke." "Hair"—when those words are invoked anywhere within the broad range of the Holocaust context. Within that context they are instantly charged with explosive, undifferentiated emotional force: the genie effect. It seems that Holocaust material is by its nature already so freighted with significance that the figurings of the individual aesthetic imagination to render actuality visible can too easily reduce it to puny scratchings.

This may have been part of what Theodor Adorno meant by his famously gnomic reflection that to write poetry after Auschwitz would be a barbarism. His dictum takes our paralysis before the great fact of the Holocaust and elevates it to a moral act, a reflex of humane sensibility. Or does he mean that the companionable shared silence which is so large a part of poetry, the silence charged with trust in an opened humane sensibility, is not possible after Auschwitz, because now our confidence in one another is gone? Yet great poetry has been written not only after Auschwitz, but out of it. Paul Antschel (or "Ancel," as it was sometimes written) was another remarkable artist to be born, like Pagis and Appelfeld, in Bukovina, at Czernonitz, that extraordinary enclave of high German culture. After the war he renamed himself "Paul Celan" in repudiation of what Germany and Germans had done to him and his. He had survived his years in a work camp in Romania, but both his parents had died in a Ukrainian concentration camp, his father of typhus, his gentle, adored mother of a German bullet in the back of the neck.

After the war Celan at first chose to live in Vienna, and to write his poetry in German: his mother's preferred tongue, the tongue of the poets they had read together, the tongue of her murderers. It was in that tongue that he wrote a poem soon after the war which delivered the language from its Nazi barbarizations, and reclaimed it as a language fit for poetry.

Todesfuge comprehends the cruelty, the terror and the pity of the murder of Jews by Germans in a steadfastly human voice, with no mythic evasions, indeed with no transcendental referents at all. In image and attitude it is rooted deeply in camp actuality. Celan initially titled the poem not "Death Fugue" but "Death Tango," the name given a tango composed by a concentration camp orchestra on the orders of an SS lieutenant (Hitler, who rejected jazz as "decadent," approved of the tango. The camp orchestra was recorded; the record still exists somewhere; it could be played, and we could hear it.) The poem itself, while rightly named a fugue for the complex reiterations and reworkings of its themes and their final, inexorable resolution, retains all the concreteness and immediacy of its first title. It is a lament and an indictment, and superbly effective as both.[7]

But it does not seek to extend our knowledge. It assumes it. Poetry may be written after Auschwitz, but despite Rorty's confidence I have come to be persuaded that there are innate difficulties in the way of the successful ficto-literary representation of the process of the Holocaust. Readers of fiction typically expect to be seduced into concern for particular characters, who are then pursued through time and different contexts to some plausible and emotionally satisfying outcome. In the case of the Holocaust the context is at once stable and unendurable, time is at once suspended and arbitrarily abbreviated, and the typical closure is at once predictable and utterly bereft of meaning and comfort. In such circumstances any good outcome, any act of dignity or defiance, appears as a falsification or sentimentalization of the general condition. Production-line killing allows small space for drama, while the huge contextual fact of the death of multitudes must trivialize the fate of the fortunate few. The Jews huddled on Schindler's ark live, Styron's Sophie survives to relive her impossible choice—but can such stories help us grasp how it was in that place, where everyone lived in the realistic expectation of death, and where nearly everyone died? Ordinary rules of dramatic narrative must at least suspend if they do not implicitly deny that great fact.

The representations discussed so far all draw on what I have called existing capital. I must exempt at least one writer (the reader will already have half a dozen in mind). Tadeusz Borowski's stories, written soon after his release from Auschwitz, were collected for publication in a volume entitled This Way to theGas, Ladies and Gentlemen.[8] Every one of them augments our understanding and exercises our imaginations in new and extraordinary ways. We watch a new recruit to the squad which relieves incoming victims of their possessions accommodate both to his duties, and to their rewards. In a dreamily pastoral setting (milk, eggs, a bountiful woman) we follow the events of an ordinary day in the work-camp at Harmenz, a subsidiary camp to Auschwitz. A young man expert in the dubious arts of survival practices his necessary skills, at the cost, as it turns out, of the life of a competitor. Meanwhile an unusually benign kapo decides to teach two raw recruits (Greek, terrified, knowing no German) how to march. If they do not learn quickly, they will surely be "selected" and die. They cannot be instructed or reassured. So, ingeniously, their teacher ties sticks to their legs to keep them rigid and drives the men in small circles in the hope that they will somehow catch on. The bizarre little exercise draws the irritated attention of an SS officer, who orders the kapo to kill his pupils. So he does: he knocks them down, places a stick across a throat, steps on it, rocks. . . .

What has happened here? What kind of story is this? In another story, a deputy kapo, already stuffed with food, allows a Jew selected for the gas to eat his fill from his surplus, and to take the leftovers with him into the Cremo. An act of compassion? Irony? Contempt? How can we tell?

Borowski's technique is masterly, his images cinematic-vivid. He engulfs us in the strange world of the camp. Does that achievement give the palm to fiction? Like Isaac Babel before him, Borowski raises in acute form the question of the relationship between I-was-there history and the fiction which comes out of that experience. I do not deny that a large part of Borowski's effect is the result of art: indeed, the writing is so economical, so finely poised, the surface so densely textured, that it is only as we try to pull away that we discover that this is glue-paper; that we are caught, bound, and implicated by more than the magical weavings of an individual sensibility. We realize that Borowski has taken us by the shoulders and shown us how it might have been in that place, back then.

Might have been? Or must have been? I am persuaded that the authority of a Tadeusz Borowski or an Isaac Babel or those other writers who present us with "fiction" made out of experience owes a great deal both to the fact and to our knowledge that they have "been there"; that they are reporting (and selecting, shaping, and inventing) out of direct observation and participation. I cannot effectively separate their texts from the greatest texts of that other genre, "survivor testimony," where subjective experience can be re-presented, with high art, by such consummate artist-witnesses as Primo Levi or Charlotte Delbo, nor from the sustained poignancy of Anne Frank's diary, a poignancy which arises in part from our knowledge of its context, but also because of the literary talent of this adolescent, preternaturally gifted writer.

Our knowledge that Borowski has indeed "been there" supplies an undertext of intimate moral implication never present in "pure" fiction. This is a difficult issue, especially in these post-postmodernist days, but it is central, and worth taking time over. In my view the largest single difference between History and Fiction (at moments like these they require capitalization) is that each establishes quite different relationships between writer and subject, and writer and reader. Were I to have discovered the nature of Humbert Humbert's secret joys in real life, I would have had him locked up. I may have tried to "understand" him, but only after I had destroyed his happiness. Snug between the covers of the fiction called Lolita I can revel in his eely escapades, his delirious deceptions; weep with him when his child slave escapes; yearn with him for her recapture. Through giving me access to the inner thoughts and the most secret actions of closed others, fiction has taught me most of what I know, or think I know, about life.

This fictional world, however, contains a curious absence. The reason for its exhilarating freedom is that it is a kind of game, a circumscribed realm of play. Once inside its covers I have no responsibility beyond my responsibility to respond to the text. I may tremble for its people, I may weep for them—but I want to relish their anguish, not heal it. I do not want Anna reconciled with Karenin and living to plump and comfortable grandmotherhood. I want her dead under that train. I want Emma Bovary to dream her dreams, to enact them, shabbily, and then to eat arsenic and die in agony. I have no human responsibility toward these people. Although they will certainly be more intimately known than my most intimate actual others, although they may often seem very much more "real," in the end my compassion is a fiction too, because I know they are fictions.

Contrast this with what happens when I read a story which claims to be true. I will know very much less about the protagonists. There is no creator to strip away their veils, so they will be somewhat opaque to me. Nonetheless, I engage with them differently because I stand in a moral relationship with these people, because they are my fellow humans, whose blood is real and whose deaths are final and not to be canceled by turning back a page.

As a reader I will also assume a different contract with the writer depending on whether that writer is offering me fiction or claiming to report on this mundane world. Listen to Flaubert, writing to a friend and gleefully pointing to the joke he had tucked into the last lines of his Légende de Saint Julian L'Hospitalier. They run: "and that is the story of Saint Julian the Hospitalier, more or less as it can be seen on a stained-glass window in a church in my part of the country." A most elegant finale, bringing us back from wonderland, depositing us gently in the real. Flaubert imagines the befuddled consternation which would have occurred had he been so foolish as to append an illustration of the cathedral window to his literary text: "Comparing the image to the text, one would have said: 'I don't understand anything. How did he get from this to that?'"[9]

"How did he get from this to that?" For Flaubert, by the pole-vault of imagination which carried him from the muddled ambiguities of the mundane to the glorious symmetries of art. In that leap anything goes—provided you get there, which Flaubert, being Flaubert, does. However devotedly he researched his novels (and he did), whenever actuality impeded aesthetic effect, he tossed actuality out the window.

I think that is the way of it with the best of the so-called "realist" novelists. (As is apparent, I have neither truck nor patience with the coy contemporary fad for "faction.") However, there are restrictions attaching to fiction's freedoms. Nabokov is an acknowledged master in the representation of cruelties—indeed, he is one of Rorty's major nominees for the "activation of imaginations" job. To return to the Holocaust: Nabokov chooses not to represent the horrors of Nazi actions against their chosen victims directly. His nearest reference to the Holocaust comes, with typical obliqueness, in a short story which refers briefly to an anxious Aunt Rosa who lived in tremulous anticipation of catastrophe "until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about."[10] Instead, he offers in Bend Sinister, published in 1947, a kind of parable of contemporary totalitarian regimes. In it Nabokov gives us a description of the physical destruction of David Krug, aged eight years. We come to know of the child's death and the manner of it by watching a film, which is also being watched by his father, Adam Krug, who is under interrogation by officials of an unidentified but generically totalitarian state. Krug has already agreed to confess to everything and anything to save his son, but there has been a small bureaucratic bungle. The hideous death we are watching has probably been ordered by "mistake." The idiocy only adds to the horror.

The horror is very well done. Yet for me the master fails—because he is writing "only" fiction, and I am therefore not compelled to heed him. Nabokov the fabricator cuffs us lightly: "Attend now." In Lolita I attended, for the pleasure of it. But I am under no obligation to attend; I could, should I choose, simply close the book. I have made that choice with Bend Sinister: the pages dealing with the death of David Krug are stapled together in my copy. I do not wish to see them even inadvertently.

My response may well be idiosyncratic but I am persuaded that we listen differently to stories which are "real," however naively or awkwardly reported, from stories, however beguiling, which we know to be invented, because in the first case we recognize our moral relationship to the protagonists, and therefore our compassionate duty to be attentive, and in the second we do not. We direct a different and more urgent curiosity toward the situations and actions of real people (which is also why we are ineluctably drawn to the testimonies of Holocaust survivors). With a work of fiction we marvel at the fictioneer's imagination. With real thought and actions presented for our scrutiny, we are brought to wonder at ourselves.

Other media also claim to expand our imaginative understanding of the human condition. Photographs stand at their own distinctive angle to the actuality they pretend to preserve. All photographs do something magical: they fix transient actuality into durable, perusable form, into iotas of transfixed time. Personal photographs do something more, converting the bright, frail moments of memory into an array of implacable images, unchallengeable kings of the cannibal empire they effortlessly establish in our heads. All photographs are melancholy: the vanished moment caught at the moment of its vanishing. All photographs are ominous: who are these special people, framed in space? All photographs are poignant: we feel the chill of an irretrievable past, the threat of an invisible future, the mortal vulnerability of the innocent, ignorant creatures caught on the silvered paper. The photographs relating to the Holocaust are melancholy, poignant, and ominous to an exquisite degree, as they catch men, women, and children huddled at railway stations, or marshaled at platforms, or harassed into cattle trucks, or trudging down roads toward vaguely-glimpsed clutters of low buildings, trees, and tall chimneys.

The pictured people are in those moments of passage still alive. They are still capable of hope. But not of rescue. Again, context is all. As with the fictional or poetic representations discussed earlier, to "make sense" of photographs of people being loaded into trains or walking along roads we have to know they are what they are: "Holocaust photographs." We already know that context. But now we "know" these people are or were real, living like us in this green world.

That capacity to convince us of the reality of the past belongs exclusively to the camera. Roland Barthes recognizes this when he celebrates the photograph as a "new, somehow experiential order of proof." "Photography's inimitable feature," he says, "is that someone has seen the referent (even if it is a matter of objects) in flesh and blood, or again in person."Seeing has always stood close to knowing.[11] He records his horror and his fascination when as a child he saw a photograph of a slave market—not a drawing, not an engraving, but a photograph ("the slave-master, in a hat, standing; the slaves, in loincloths, sitting")—because now "there was a certainty that such a thing had existed: not a question of exactitude, but reality: the historian was no longer the mediator, slavery was given without mediation. . . ." "We look at the paper inscribed by the alchemy of photography by the light rays which once emanated from some actual object, and the connection is unequivocally made: That-has-been."[12]

The photographs of the Holocaust not only persuade us of its reality. They are also suffused by bitter affect: like the after-the-event photographs of the dead and the barely-ambulant corpses of Buchenwald and Belsen, they are direct records of our failure, and of our guilt: alive at the time of their suffering, we did nothing to alleviate it. In time (because of that powerful affect?) we come to refer to them with the unconscious fluency we reserve for personal memories. We may also incline to grant them the immunity from scrutiny we grant our own memories. They are, nonetheless, texts, and therefore must be analyzed, evaluated, and interpreted, like any other text.

That we have these indispensable photographs at all underlies the contingency of the historical enterprise. Unsurprisingly, photography within Auschwitz, as in all the other camps, was officially forbidden: these were secret matters. We have the photograph of a small girl walking alone to her death only because an SS man had been given special permission to photograph the arrival, separation, and selection of victims in the interests, we are told, of "scientific racial research." The man had maintained a home in Czechoslovakia. After the war a Jewish woman had moved into his house, found the photographs, and sold them to the Jewish museum in Prague, where after many years they were recognized for what they were by a former Auschwitz prisoner. Add the miracle that the frail pasteboard did not curl or crack or fade (photographs are fragile). Another string of photographs revealing the doings of a Reserve Police Battalion in occupied Poland—rounding up Jews for execution, to be shot in the local forest or packed into trains for Treblinka, tormenting pallid bearded men and old, bent, terrified women—we have because the men had kept these postcards from Poland, and a court was able to sequester them. Only the long trail of happenstance has preserved them for us, so we can look at these people, into the wary faces of the children, the haggard adults, and know them to be living beings, as real as the people we might jostle on a railway platform today.[13] We have photographs of the people being loaded into cattle cars for Treblinka (with three barefooted boys, one carrying his little brother pickaback, nervously hanging back behind the crush) because a young Austrian soldier traveling through Siedlce station on his way to the front on 22 August 1942 saw the loading in process: saw the people being forced into the cars, saw them beaten—and dared to photograph them illicitly. The photographs were presented as part of the evidence against ten former Treblinka guards on trial at Dusseldorf in 1964. When Gitta Sereny spoke with Hubert Pfoch in 1972 in Vienna, he recalled that seconds after he had taken the photograph the tall Ukrainian guard in the background "had hit out so hard at the children who were slow to move, that he split the butt of his rifle in two."[14]

Photographs tell the moment. Documentary film makes the claim to record moments-in-sequence; to capture Barthes's "that-has-been,"too. A genre which can range from Leni Riefenstahl's heroic mythologizing of Germanic fantasies to the superficial innocence of the amateur handheld camera is too protean to be discussed here—although even brief reflection suggests that, given its protean exuberance, truth is a greased pig, to be caught, if caught at all, in flight. "Fictional" film, with its visual vividness, its magical simulation of reality, is only marginally less complex. Most commercial films about the Holocaust have vulgarized the events even more grossly than have popular novels. Consider, for example, the American series Holocaust, where terrible actuality is subordinated to, and suborned by, a standard girl-boy romantic narrative, or the German series Heimat, where exculpatory sentimentality takes unchallenged precedence. Hear Elie Wiesel on what the populace gets from the "cheap and simplistic melodramas" which pretend to represent the Holocaust: "a little history, a heavy dose of sentimentality and suspense, a dash of theological ruminations about the silence of God, and there it is: let kitsch rule in the land of kitsch."[15]

These are the deformations typical of popular fiction, and ought not to be blamed on the medium. Nonetheless, I have to confess to a mistrust of film as a vehicle for conveying authentic (which must mean tentative and unstable) historical understanding. Film is a treacherously expansive, not to say uncontrollable medium, both in the exuberance of its information (settings, styles, physiques, behavior—everything must appear) and in its swift, various, and incalculable effect upon the individual imagination. Steven Spielberg's superb ghetto-clearing sequences in Schindler's List are testimony of film's incomparable capacity in the hands of a great director to represent the scope and the staccato rhythms of such mass "actions," without obliterating the individual—although it is as well to remember that while the representation brilliantly presents the ruthlessness of the action's execution and design, it does not represent any individual's experience at the time. Even Schindler on his horse on his hill could not have seen a fraction of what the roaming, swooping camera allows us to see. And even Spielberg sweetens the horror of his concocted scenes by providing the consolatory figure of the little girl in red, herded with the victims, then making her perilous way back to precarious safety. We follow her uncertain passage easily because of the darkness all around her. Cinematically her image works to distract us from the contextual horror, to supply a spurious comfort.

By its nature, film cannot be made properly respectful of the mysteries and the ambiguities of actual experience. Even less can it be made respectful of the kind of fragmentary and ambiguous documentation on which history depends. It must at once say too much, in its expert mimicry of the richness and density of actuality, and too little, in its concealed selectivity, its beguiling, invisible anglings and strokings and paintings, and even at its most mannered it insists on its own existential veracity. For all its apparent realism, its glory is its remoteness from the actuality it mimes so eloquently. Its home territory is not the actual, but the mythical.

An example from my own home territory: despite borrowing its name from the historical record, Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God represents no conquistador that ever was. As an account of any actual Amazonian exploration it is irretrievably melodramatic. But it is also a superb distillation of the fantasies and potentialities simmering within the heads of many actual expedition leaders, and their followers too, and a demonstration of how easily supremely reckless visions of conquest can degenerate into nightmares of murder and self-delusion. Film is the incomparable medium for dreams choreographed to be shared by the waking. We watch Riefenstahl's extravaganzas unfurl like banners to display the Nazi vision for Germany, the sophistication of Nazi theatrical skills, and the ecstasy those skills unleashed in the throbbing thousands gathered for the ritual of affirmation, and we are enlightened as we could not be by any other medium. But film remains a drunken giant, not apt for the delicate imaginative and critical work of transmitting our uncertain understandings of the worlds that have closed behind us.

There is, however, one remarkable film, part documentary, part most conscious work of art, which forces the most committed champion of the literary text to admit the importance of the human contexts concealed behind the words we puzzle over on the page: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. That film also demonstrates the process of "increasing understanding" in, as it were, slow motion—or, as I think about it, in real human time. Who can forget the opening shot of gentle meadows, of two men strolling, quietly talking (later a light male voice sings a Polish folk-song)? Who can forget how, as they talk, the innocent pastoral before us changes? We stare at silent fields, at rusting railway tracks with soft grass tufting between them, and are forced to locate and reconstruct buildings, sidings, walkways, chimneys. Then, the structures having being inexorably established in the imagination, we are made to people them: to people them out of information slowly being fed to us in interaction with banks of mem ories we did not know we held. We are being educated in horrors. The very length of the film (more than nine hours) mimics the "abnormal" elongation of misery, the monotony of exhaustion and anguish, endured by those immured in the camps.

Throughout, Lanzmann is omnipresent, forcing his witness-sources to ever more precise recollection, establishing places, times, and actions with chilling exactitude. His concern is solely with the killings of the Jews, and with their killing in the gas chambers: he begins his film at Chelmno, in December 1941. Throughout, this cinematic hauteur sustains the relentless critique of sources which I would urge as the organizing narrative for all serious historians. Who can forget the barber, recalled from retirement to a Tel Aviv shop, clipping the hair of a customer as he struggles to respond to Lanzmann's questioning; laying down his scissors, shaking his head, slowly, painfully weeping—and Lanzmann's voice insisting that he go on? And go on he does, taking up his scissors, "collecting himself" by the routine exercise of routine skills, going on, slowly, painfully, as if wading through waist-deep mud.

In the course of an analysis of filmed testimonies James Young explains some of the processes we have been watching: ". . . these memories are still part of the survivor's inner life, still an inner wound; if, in watching these memories pass from the private to the public sphere, we also feel some of the pain in this transition, we may understand something about the consequences of both the experiences and the telling of such experiences. In the testimonial image, we also perceive the traces of the story the survivor is not telling; these traces are in his eyes, his movements, his expressions—all of which become part of the overall text of video testimony, suggesting much more than we are hearing and seeing. We grasp here that memory is being transmitted not merely through narrative but by body movements and behavior as well. . . . We thus find transmitted a universe of non-verbal memory—signs no less than language to be interpreted and decoded."[16]

Lanzmann privileges we who are new to the analysis of video testimony to watch that moment when memory is first transformed into language. (He also introduces historians to what must become a major source for future work.) Writers must destroy silence in order to represent it. In filmed testimony silence is as present, and sometimes more eloquent, than speech. We watch as "memory" is being selected and verbalized—a most crucial transition for the historian, who must typically be content with the inscriptions which come out of that painful birthing. Lanzmann insists that we watch, and watch again, because by that repetition we are forced to awareness of a truth that the daily work of living (like the daily work of "doing history") tempts us to forget: that heard words are the products of obscure interactions of fluctuating circumstance and unstable memory; that words inscribed on the page, made though they are out of human experience and human emotions, have an apparent solidity which denies and conceals the exigency of their origins. There can be no unmediated access to the experience of others—that is a dullard's fantasy—but just how great the distance is between experience and texts, and how masked from us the circumstances of their making, is here made manifest, as we watch these men and women hesitating, rejecting, searching for the particular words which will best seize and hold any one out of the shoal of possible and potential "memories" flickering behind their eyes. We are being shown memory in process, not memory encrypted as sacred relic. (With interesting exceptions: a few witnesses, like Filip Müller, or Rudolph Vrba, or Richard Glazar, had at some point already committed their testimonies to paper. Their spoken testimonies, having already been scripted, are, as we would expect, distinctively fluent.)

The Shoah interrogations also mimic the confusion of tongues which existed in the camps, with its attendant demoralization of perception. Lanzmann speaks French and German, but he does not speak Polish, Hebrew, or Yiddish, so questions and answers ripple through transforming veils of language; witnesses and interrogators, straining to understand, respond to what they think they understand; we strain to absorb the import of fleeting English subtitles, and fume at their inadequacy. As witnesses speak, we see they are visibly abashed by the grotesqueness of what they must say. And Lanzmann is a brutal interrogator: under his insistence, witnesses writhe away from the cameras, resist, refuse. We watch something like torture when the man who years before had been forced to cut the hair from the heads of naked men, women, children before they were sent into the gas is asked how he felt "when he saw those naked women." We experience a kind of visceral recognition of the impossibility of response to such a question. We see that indeed there is no "why" here: only the abasement and anguish of utter physical and cognitive helplessness. We also glimpse, unwillingly, and, I think, as no part of Lanzmann's intention, how other coerced agents of the perpetrators—kapos, the men of the Sonderkommandos, even the perpetrators themselves—could have arrived, in time, at a sort of doomed detachment, once the obscene system had been kicked into action.

Having been made to watch the barber's anguish at his helplessness, we can also better understand why the legends cherished by camp inmates usually had to do with heroically purposeful and confrontational, moments. In prisoner testimonies prisoners rebuke guards, look them in the eye, offer defiance—and against all reason and all experience get away with it. On the ramp (or in the undressing room—the precise venue does not matter) a young woman dancer is recognized by an SS officer and ordered to dance. Magically released by the kinetic energy of her art from the oppression of accumulating circumstance, she dances up to her persecutor, seizes his revolver, and shoots him. Sometimes she dies in the next instant, sometimes she scores a couple of further hits before disappearing into the crowd. What matters is the glorious defiance, the denial of abjection, of the action.

FILIP MULLER Survivor of Auschwitz: from Shoah
FILIP MULLER Survivor of Auschwitz
from Shoah
The whole film is clearly an intensely controlled product: an object of Lanzmann's contriving. We hear Lanzmann's voice, cajoling, prompting, bullying; then he appears, filling half the screen. Concealed from our sight, he cuts kilometers of film into the meters he decides we should see, and choreographs the positioning of these fragments to concoct tiny narratives set within a frame of his choosing.[17] Nonetheless, and despite his total power, Lanzmann has been criticized on the grounds that his film offered "no over-all interpretation." The comment is true, but grounds for congratulation, not censure. He names his film Shoah not to locate it in some transcendental upland of myth, but to describe its contents: these partial, contested memories, this past and present pain, is what the Shoah was, and what the Shoah is. Then, watching this thing of his making, we further clothe what each of us sees out of our individual understandings and imaginings. It is precisely the film's stoical review of the range and flux of human experiences, the inadequacy of "simple" interpretations, and the impossibility of closure which makes it what it remarkably is: an accurate representation of the piling horrors as they, bewilderingly, occurred; as they continue to bewilder and to horrify us.[18] It is at once a record, an argument in the process of its making, and a series of tentative, problematic interpretations constructed out a conspiracy of director and viewer. Because it is all these things it is also, in my view, superb history.

All these works in their different media seek to represent the Shoah of the victims. While Lanzmann presents both victims and perpetrators, his style changes radically when he confronts the perpetrators and their accomplices. With them he is not concerned to probe memories and emotions. What he intends is to expose and to destroy. Thrusting the camera in close, he pins them, holds them, framing their confusion, their shiftiness, or (in the case of those unforgettable Polish peasants and railway men) their tainted geniality. He wants to shame and humiliate them. When he holds Unterscharführer Franz Suchomel in the frame (filming him without his knowledge and against his wish) he wants, he says, to "kill him with the camera."[19] He wants us to share his rage.

Those are appropriate and understandable emotions, and for the duration of the film he has the art to make us share them. But when that same Franz Suchomel was persuaded to speak with Gitta Sereny we began to see something of the man he was. If we want to achieve some measure of understanding of the men whose thoughts and actions created such places and effected such despair, men who typically concealed their subjectivities from others and often from themselves, whose intentions and emotions must be inferred from cautious self-protective statements and glimpses of routinized action—then (and as I have been arguing throughout) only the patient burrowings, the slow-motion assessments and retrievals, and the fastidious, rule-bound interpretations of the historian will serve.

The "Final Solution" appalls most by its inhuman dimensions: it counts in millions. Levi and Delbo and others like them have defied that cruel reduction, first by opening their subjective experience to us, then by retrieving a gallery of people who remained irreducibly individual in the lowest circle of death. Perhaps that is what their art most teaches us. Some months ago I tried to write an essay on death, and learned by failure what any survivor could have told me: there is no category. Every death is its own discrete catastrophe. Within the mass of the only apparently anonymous we must seek, grasp, and hold the individual action, the individual situation. There are a thousand snapshots of such actions and situations recorded in the mound of documents generated by the Holocaust, as in the handful of actual photographs which survive it. The energy for the historical enterprise is inherent in the material. The old woman surrounded by grinning thugs at Lieutenant Gnade's "Undressing Station" has done her persecutors no injury. She could not if she tried. She is terrified, as those millions of others who were humiliated and brutalized were terrified. We know what has been done to her, as we know what will be done. We look, and our muscles tighten. We are as roused as ever Rorty wished us to be. We burn to intervene.

The desire is futile. While some of her tormentors may still live, the woman is dead. But the moral and the intellectual energy generated out of that photograph provides the essential fuel for action. An awakened, outraged sensibility demands systematic inquiry. And as the photograph makes clear, it is not enough to loathe the perpetrator and to pity the victim, because in that scene they are bound together. We must try to understand them both.

Milan Kundera has observed that the "struggle of men against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." That is true. But human rememberings, whether individual or collective, are not inert archives, but factories of dreams, and hopes, and illusions. They are also our surest individual homeland, essential evidence of our essential being, and our impulse will be to defend them against all comers. The men and women who lived through the Holocaust will manage their memories as they must, to render present circumstance endurable, to authenticate the present self. Collective memory, created out of shared experience, will go on functioning in much the same way—if it is allowed to do so. We have learned what self-indulgent collective memory can do when yoked to political interest and murderous impulse. Only disciplined, critical remembering will resist the erasure of fact and circumstance effected by time, by ideology, and by the natural human impulse to forget.

NOTES

    1. Some of the following arguments draw on those presented in Inga Clendinnen, "Fellow-Sufferers: History and the Imagination," AustralianHumanities Review, Internet http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR, September 1996.return to text

    2. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989), xiii-xvi.return to text

    3. In a response to my "Fellow-Sufferers" essay Professor Rorty declared that the insulting omission was unintended; that he had simply forgotten to put History in. (Rorty, Private Communication 20/11/96). I remain unappeased.return to text

    4. For criticism from a fellow poet, see Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber, 1988). For an exploration of Plath's rhetoric, see James E. Young, "The Holocaust Confessions of Sylvia Plath," in his Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 117-33.return to text

    5. See Aharon Appelfeld, The Retreat, Badenheim 1939, The Healer, and (most perfectly) To The Land of the Reeds. For some comments of his own, see Appelfeld as quoted in Philip Roth, Operation Shylock: a Confession (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993), 83-6.return to text

    6. Dan Pagis, quoted by Sidra De'Koven Ezrahi, "'The Grave in the Air': Unbound Metaphors in Post-Holocaust Poetry," in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution, edited by Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 259-76. Pagis, like Appelfeld, is Romanian, from Bukhovina, and writes in Hebrew. Unlike Appelfeld's Toni or Lotte, is his female victim prescient—but silenced before she can speak her numinous words? No: the Pagis poem is a written message, complete in its space. The putative message has no possible locus for existence.return to text

    7. In an act of ritual exorcism, and as a sign of penitence, the Celan poem was appropriated by post-war Germany and set as a text in its schools. On the tango connection see John Bayley, The New York Review of Books, 14 November 1996, 38. For the best and most accessible account of Celan, see the book Bayley was reviewing: John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). For the problems of translation, see John Felstiner, "Translating Paul Celan's 'Todesfuge,'"in Friedlander, Probing the Limits of Representation, 240-58.return to text

    8. Tadeusz Borowski, This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, first published in Polish in 1948 (New York: Viking, 1967). For a fine discussion of Borowski's fiction, of the world of moral cannibalism he described and survived, and of his struggle to come to terms with the world after his release, see Lawrence Langer, Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), especially 103-24. Borowski killed himself by gas in Warsaw in 1951, at age twenty-nine.return to text

    9. Gustave Flaubert, quoted by Victor Brombert, The Hidden Reader (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 151.return to text

    10. Vladimir Nabokov, "Signs and Symbols," The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (London: Vintage International, 1997). See also the even more oblique (and marginally less telling) "Conversation Piece, 1945"in the same volume.return to text

    11. I am told that in Ancient Greek the standard words for "know" and "see" come from the same verb, whose root is the same as that of the Latin verb "video," which sustains the same dual meaning—as it does in English.return to text

    12. "The thing of the past, by its immediate radiations (its luminances), has really touched the surface which in turn my gaze will touch." Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 81. Computer imaging threatens to erase this confidence about the integrity and reliability of photographs.return to text

    13. The information regarding the photographs' provenance comes from the "Note on Illustrations," Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, translated by Constantine FitzGibbon (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1959).return to text

    14. Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (London: Picador, 1977), 158-59.return to text

    15. Elie Wiesel, "Trivializing Memory," in From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 167.return to text

    16. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, 162 and passim. return to text

    17. Lanzmann shot 350 hours of film. Clearly, there could have been multiple Shoahs. He freely acknowledges that the film is "his": "The film is made around my own obsessions; it wouldn't have been possible otherwise." Quoted by Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, 157.return to text

    18. Pauline Kael, prestigious film critic of the New Yorker, found Shoah "logy [sic] and exhausting right from the start," and summed the whole up as "a long moan." She opines (severely) that "A moan is not an appropriate response to the history of the Jews." Pauline Kael, Hooked (New York: Dutton, 1989), 88. Apparently unaware of their literary pasts, Kael is charmed by the fluency and the "simple, unforced dramatic power" of a Filip Müller or a Rudolph Vrba. She is, merely, bored by "the silences, the hesitancies, the breakdowns."return to text

    19. Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 287. It is possible that those sinisterly cheerful Poles may have innocently misrepresented themselves because of their ignorance both of the medium and of Lanzmann's intentions.return to text