‘Have we – we who have returned – been able to understand and make others understand our experience?’: The Emotional Histories of Literary Holocaust Testimony
Testimony may once have been considered a tool through which historians and courtrooms might glean information: a source of knowledge through which events could be pieced together for the sake of clarity for those who were not present. Even in these deceptively simple contexts, however, testimony was already subject to many of the caveats that trauma theory would later entrench as inherent features of testimony, the most pertinent of which must have been the distorted and often fragmentary nature of memory. However, though testimony has always been problematic in its form, its function remained clear: testimony was gathered in order to establish as objective and accurate a view of past events as possible. In regards to viewing testimony as a form of literature, this is often no longer the case. Testimony as literature now appears less concerned with recounting events with objectivity and accuracy; rather, what modern writers (who crucially aren’t writing as historians in this context) seem to want to impart to those consuming their words is the essence of their experience: their own unique subjective view of events articulated, primarily, to suit their emotions. I will utilise the works of two Holocaust survivors to demonstrate this: Otto Dov Kulka’s Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death best shows how Holocaust testimony has become literary in its form, while Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved best articulates the questions surrounding the new purpose of Holocaust testimonies. Both writers, along with other critics, raise the question, overtly or not, if and how Holocaust testimony is unique within its own niche genre of literature. Indeed, as Primo Levi states, it is
thanks to the superhuman concern of a number of fighter-historians (historians of themselves) … testimony survived, other historians could rediscover how, day by day, the ghetto lived and died (2013:3).
Since these ‘fighter-historians’ belong to the first definition of testimony – that of history books and courtrooms – their task is of a different sort than Levi’s. They account for the ‘day by day’ of the Holocaust, so that historians might immortalise the struggles of survivors and victims alike. However, due to the unique nature of the Holocaust, the gathering of objective fact reaches a logical and philosophical conclusion. Not only the lack of specific data surrounding the Holocaust contributes to this endpoint, but the changing necessities of what must be learned from these events causes Holocaust testimony to evolve into something beyond facts and figures; as Levi states, ‘even today there is discussion as to whether the victims were four, six, or eight million: though one still talks of millions’ (2013:3). From this we can see that in his testimony Levi is not interested in the factual intricacies of the events, but its emotional and cultural impact. All this bring into question what is purpose of testimony is beyond objective fact. In The Drowned and the Saved, he ‘did not intend to do, nor would [he] have been able to do, a historian’s work’ (Levi, 2013:13). Instead, he ‘means to contribute to the clarification of some aspects of the Lager phenomenon which still appear obscure’ (Levi, 2013:13). The precise meaning of this, and the precise function of Levi’s book and of testimony literature as a whole, I will discuss later. For now, this statement of intent is sufficient in demonstrating that the goal of testimony is no longer a matter of piecing together a scene from history, rather it is the task of articulating the emotions, philosophical implications, and psychological repercussions of these events, with answers rarely being definitive or simple.
With this change in function, testimony has father changed in its form; a simple run through of actions and reactions will no longer do, and so authors must turn to less conventional means to articulate their experiences. For Otto Dov Kulka in Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death, chief among this new language of testimony appears to be metaphor, simile, implication, and a utilisation of poetry – which is arguably a form of testimony literature in and of itself. It should be noted that while this essay will functionally be an exploration of the form and function of testimony as literature, I will largely be focusing my study upon that of Holocaust testimony. This is because to many – including Levi, who writes, ‘the Nazi concentration camp system still remains a unicum, both in its extent and quality’ (Levi, 2013:14) – the Holocaust is a unique event in human history, and one which many critics identify as being of paramount importance to trauma theory and the evolution of testimony into a form of literature. To Stef Craps, the importance of testimony in regards to wider trauma theory
is apparent from the work of Caruth, Felman and Laub, Hartman, and LaCapra, trauma theory as a field of cultural scholarship developed out of an engagement with Holocaust testimony, literature, and history (2013: 46).
She identifies Holocaust testimony specifically, as being crucial to trauma theory. To understand the metamorphosis testimony has undergone and in order for the assertion that it is a unique form of literature to be at all justifiable, one may analyse the introduction of Kulka’s Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death. Kulka immediately cuts his own persona in half before even page one, when he makes plain the distinction between the historian whose ‘attitude of strict and impersonally remote research’ (Kulka, 2014: xi) appears to clash with the man’s personal recordings, which were ‘neither historical testimony nor autobiographical memoir’ (Kulka, 2014:xi). Within this latter persona inhabits Kulka’s own ‘private mythology’ in which resides ‘The Metropolis of Death’ (Kulka, 2014:xi). Anna Richardson explains the traditional role of ‘historical record, which methodically adheres to hard fact and traditionally rejects survivor testimony as being too ‘imaginative’ (2005:7). Indeed, Kulka makes plain the distinction between his voice as a historian and his own personal voice, through which he articulates his mythology. He calls this distinction a ‘dimension of silence… a choice I made to sever the biographical from the historical past’ (Kulka, 2014:xi). Already and overtly, Kulka is making plain to the reader that what follows within this particular work is something new; neither biography, nor memoir, nor history, and not even testimony (or at least, not as it is traditionally recognised). All this makes literary testimony functionally appear as a grand experiment in form: an experimental method of articulating things which are usually inarticulable. He calls this inner dimension, ‘the reflections of a person then in his late fifties and sixties, turning over in his mind those fragments of memory and imagination that have remained from the world of the wondering child of ten to eleven that I had once been’ (Kulka, 2014: xi). What Kulka is beginning to articulate here is the inherently paradoxical nature of both trauma and testimony; the presence of the past invading the future, the need to articulate that which is inarticulable, the yearning to understand that which cannot be comprehended.
Kulka extends these dichotomies and paradoxes to literary form and genre categorisation when he says that Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death ‘in itself reveals immanent tensions: a confrontation between images of memory and the representation of historical research’ (Kulka, 2014: xi). In essence, Kulka has created a book in conflict with itself. Some critics regard history and memory to be inseparable entities, especially when one is discussing modern history and testimony. Therefore, the question of testimony’s genre categorisation as either historical or literary sounds problematic here: it sounds as though it belongs to neither one. Dan Stone echoes this dichotomy when he describes ‘memory as a future-oriented phenomenon which can be part of historical inquiry but also anti-historicist and given to myth’ (Stone, 2014: 18). Perhaps part of Kulka’s aim with Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death is to reconcile memory with history in a way which preserves the most engaging aspects of both. Throughout the book, Kulka interlaces biographical anecdotes, historical events, images, and his own mythological language, in a way which would certainly be in conflict with both historical research and the form of traditional testimony. But by embracing the ‘anti-historicist’ and mythological aspects of memory Kulka both draws attention to the dichotomy of testimony but also goes some way to help rectifying it. By establishing a clear language of metaphor and emotion and making it distinct from historical accounts of the Holocaust, Kulka improves both modes of writing by turning a flaw into a method for gleaning fresh, insightful, and human perspectives on an infinitely human historical event. By embracing testimony’s relationship to memory, and the inherent flaws of memory, Kulka turns it into a literary enterprise as well as a historical one. He goes some way to fulfilling Stone’s view of testimony as being ‘both historical evidence and as something which, in its capacity as life story, resists the homogeneous flattening potential of the past’ (Stone, 2014:18). By inventing a new form for testimony Kulka increases its nuance and makes it able to capture the emotions of the past, not just the events.
One of the earliest and most unique anecdotes Kulka reveals takes place in 1978 Poland, when Kulka tells a colleague at a conference that he would be visiting Auschwitz. The colleague, being unaware of Kulka’s personal history with the site, goes on to advise him to visit ‘Birkenau-that is the real Auschwitz’ (Kulka, 2014: 3). What may be perplexing to many readers is Kulka’s response to this: ‘He didn’t ask if I had any connection with that place. If he had asked, I would have replied. I would not have denied it. But he didn’t ask, I didn’t reply and I went’ (Kulka, 2014:3). Kulka’s reply is perplexing for the same reasons that much of the discussion surrounding trauma and testimony is: traumatic experiences are often described as inarticulable and incomprehensible, yet there are many examples of testimonies (like Kulka’s and Levi’s) which dispute this. In this private, unsaid reply Kulka captures the inherent paradox of trauma. Kulka clearly has a strong desire to tell his college about his experience, but he does not and perhaps, at this moment, he cannot. Many critics refer to the Holocaust in particular as an event which is both incomprehensible and inarticulable, perhaps making the yearning to speak of it all the stronger. This feature of Holocaust testimony presents a problem for those who read it, as Robert Eaglestone describes:
we who come after the Holocaust and know about it only through representations are frequently and with authority told that it is incomprehensible. However, the representations seem to demand us to do exactly that’ (2004: 19).
Here, we see Kulka’s unsaid reply broadened to a scale which covers all works which reference the Holocaust. Eaglestone is referencing here the literary process of ‘identification’, the process in which the reader is asked by the text (be it fiction or non-fiction) to empathise with the subject. Trauma’s natural tendency to deny identification with others clashes with the desire to tell one’s story, and results in unique works of testimony which must find creative solutions to this discrepancy in order to impart anything at all. This fluid and unique form of literary testimony is a natural bi-product and partial solution to this problem and to Eaglestone:
It is precisely this questioning of identification and the context in which it occurs that explains the general experience voiced by Blanchot and others, and that, with the events from which it emerges, makes testimony a new genre (2004: 16).
For Kulka, a careful use of language is what comprises the new genre of literary testimony, as he blends the overt factual horrors with the euphemisms of his personal mythology. After a mostly frank and revealing description of the moment Kulka, as a child, saw the smokestacks of Auschwitz he reveals the essence of the scene as being a ‘primal experience’ and that what has persisted throughout the years ‘is the trauma, recurring numberless times and encapsulating, like a highly concentrated essence, the immutable law of the Great Death’ (Kulka, 2014: 33). By emphasising the endless and pervasive recurrence of trauma, Kulka imparts upon the reader the emotional impact of the traumas of the Holocaust. He makes one understand (at least partially) that trauma occurs not only in the moment of pain, but also in many moments after the physical experience has ended. Furthermore, by describing the experience as ‘primal’ Kulka demystifies the victim’s reaction to Auschwitz, and in so doing retains their relatable humanity in the face of an incomprehensible horror. Kulka’s use of his unique yet instantly recognisable and digestible euphemisms is key to the effectiveness of this passage too; ‘the Great Death’ makes the horror of the experience palpable beyond time, and helps to make an understanding of the victim’s trauma more universal. Other phrases from this mythological vocabulary like; ‘immutable law’, ‘the small death’, ‘life beyond death’, and of course, ‘the metropolis of death’, all culminate in giving Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death a recognisable and comprehensible voice. The importance of this cannot be understated, though Kulka does not quite fully succeed in creating a form for testimony which is entirely identifiable (such a thing may not be possible where trauma is concerned and especially in regards to the Holocaust) his attempt is incredibly significant for not only testimony as literature but trauma theory in general. By making the form of testimony more freely expressive it becomes less rigid than history yet more concrete than memory, and works towards solving the greatest difficulty with identifying with another’s trauma:
The failure to grasp the experience is usually seen to lie not so much in the absence of shared life practise per se but as a result of a break between the language and reference itself (Eaglestone, 2004: 17).
In this context, it seems imperative that testimony be treated more as literature than history, for it seems writers of testimony need the freedom of language literature offers in order to properly articulate their stories and thoughts. To Menachem Kaiser (2010),
literature is supplementary, not antithetical to history: it allows, and in the best instances demands readers to universalise, empathise, to visualise and imagine, not merely to be informed.
Kulka’s use of euphemism and metaphor may have even greater significance than this: Hannah Ardent is said to have claimed that
close attention to testimonies often reveals them to have an ‘apotropaic effect’, forcing us to turn away from an evil we do not wish to recognize (in Stone, 2014:18-19).
This criticism of testimony is not without merit, and indeed the temptation is often there for many readers. But by utilising his own impactful yet digestible language of mythology Kulka avoids Ardent’s issue by making testimony more digestible. Which is not by any means to say pleasurable: Kulka’s language is still often heart wrenching, but one is able to stomach and endure and is drawn onwards to do so by Kulka’s imaginative use of language. This enables the reader to find the human emotional centre at the heart of all testimony. Perhaps most importantly, Kulka’s experimental use of form keeps the discussion around testimony free and open: literary testimony in this way may challenge pre-conceived notions of trauma and testimony and make efforts to solve its inherent issues. The most pressing of which must be, how does one articulate the inarticulable?
To Dori Laub, the solution to the problem of articulation is rooted in the problem itself:
the traumatic experience has normally long been submerged and has become distorted in its submersion… The horror is, indeed, compelling not only in its reality, but even more so, in its flagrant distortion and subversion of reality (1992:76).
What Laub calls ‘submersion’ we can interpret as euphemistic of the act of not telling, as Kulka does to his colleague, the assertion then that this makes the traumatic event, or ‘horror’, more compelling, is interesting both internally and externally. Internally, this acts as a fitting metaphor through which to describe the tendency for the memory of traumatic events to become distorted, amplifying the horrors therein. This also reflects to the external usefulness of this metaphor, as it demonstrates how trauma’s natural language appears to largely be euphemism. With this in mind then, Kulka’s embracing of metaphor and euphemism in the form of his testimony not only avoids the issues Ardent mentions, but does so through a method which informs one of the very natures of the language of trauma.
Interestingly, when articulating the traumas of the Holocaust, Kulka does not only use horrors; he briefly but poignantly describes moments of beauty he experienced within Auschwitz:
The colour is blue: clear blue skies of summer. Silver-coloured toy aeroplanes carrying greetings from distant worlds…the skies remain blue and lovely…the was the Auschwitz of that eleven-year-old boy’ (2014: 75).
Kulka’s language becomes simpler and more repetitive here, imparting a distinctly singular image, and committing fully to the child-like voice of the moment. Here, Kulka fully commits to the unconventional form of literary testimony by wholly embracing his memory without apology or framing. In doing so he makes it believable that at that moment he ‘took in nothing but that beauty’ and demonstrates that traumatic memories often remain alongside pleasant ones which are similarly imposed upon the minds of victims; ‘they have remained imprinted in my memory’ (Kulka, 2014: 75). Kulka uses his memory and the form of his text to show another key aspect of the experience of trauma, that in which traumatic memories often affect adjacent experiences and so contrast, like in all human experiences, becomes integral in understanding and is an immensely helpful in the act of articulation: ‘This contrast is an integral element of the black columns that are swallowed up in the crematoria’ (Kulka, 2014: 75).
Eaglestone asks the question, why is Primo Levi ‘fascinating to read, but not pleasurable?’ (Eaglestone, 2004: 15). This raises several further questions on not only the nature of Levi’s work, but the nature of literary testimony itself: indeed, a rigid study of historical sources surrounding the Holocaust may similarly be described as fascinating but not pleasurable, but Levi’s familiar and often philosophical tone elicits a different kind of fascination in its readership. The fluidity of form this unique genre affords makes it possible for Levi to propose some of the unanswerable questions which still surround the Holocaust. This is possibly best represented in the grey zone chapter of The Drowned and the Saved: in it, Levi describes an ‘extreme case of collaboration’ in the ‘Sonderkommandos of Auschwitz and the other extermination camps’ (Levi, 2013:48). Levi lists the role of the Sonderkommandos in the camp:
It was their task to maintain order among the new arrivals (often completely unaware of the destiny awaiting them) who must be sent into the gas chambers; to extract the corpses from the chambers, pull gold teeth from jaws, cut the women’s hair, sort and classify clothes, shoes, and the contents of the luggage; transport the bodies to the crematoria and oversee the operation of the ovens; extract and eliminate the ashes (2013:48).
I feel it is important to include Levi’s description of the duties of the Sonderkommandos in its entirety to demonstrate how his use of punctuation extends his list, and makes the horror palpable to the reader. A history book, uniformly describing sources, may also adequately describe the role of the Sonderkommandos, but what Levi achieves here looks past cold facts to articulate the human traumas of the Holocaust. In describing them in this fashion, Levi is able to ask questions about the Sonderkommandos which history books perhaps cannot, by bringing the reader closer to identifying with them, by making us understand that theirs is an unidentifiable situation:
All these sources are in agreement, and yet we found it difficult, almost impossible, to form an image for ourselves of how these men lived day by day, saw themselves, accepted their condition (2013: 49).
In the case of the grey zone, the problem of identification Eaglestone mentioned is amplified here, and yet paradoxically we are able to identify with Levi (a survivor himself) more closely with this shared inability to identify, or judge, those who appear in the grey zone. After all, Levi himself considers that
we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses… We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority… they are the rule, we are the exception’ (2013:89).
In this way, the reader may identify with Levi by sharing in his struggle to identify with those who died in the Holocaust. Levi’s testimony (and testimonies like it) is considered by him to not be the ‘real’ testimony of the Holocaust, making its uniqueness even more fitting and his struggle to identify even more relatable.
Contrary to what one may imagine, Levi’s purpose behind writing the grey zone appears to be far from the act of passing judgement. Hannah Pollin-Galay notes that Levi
remembers a whole spectrum of wrongdoers… yet his memories do not build a forensic case against them. Rather, as he puts it, Levi recalls the brutal deeds of these people in order to “furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind” (2018:108).
Levi further complicates the idea of ‘wrongdoers’ throughout the grey zone: nevertheless, his study of the human mind appears to reject a historical approach to testimony or ‘forensic case’, in favour of a psychiatric and possibly philosophical set of fluid ideas and proposals. It is clear then that, for Levi, the purpose of literary testimony is not merely to reproduce answers but to produce questions. In this way Levi contradicts Ardent when she asserted that ‘an individual account could offer stories of violence and brutality, but could not adequately explain the totalitarian system itself’ (in Stone, 2014:18). In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi manages to do both. In fact, possibly it is because of the fact he makes the ‘violence and brutality’ of the Lagers and camps so palpable, for that was the reality of the totalitarian system after all.
Though the questions Levi poses aren’t always answered by himself (and when they are, they are rarely simple answers) in the case of the Sonderkommandos he does come to one inescapable conclusion that,
conceiving and organising the squads was National Socialism’s most demonic crime… the institution represented an attempt to shift on to others- specifically the victims- the burden of guilt’ (2013:52).
By refusing to pass judgement on the Sonderkommandos themselves and instead unequivocally condemning the Nazis, Levi is shifting the guilt of the Holocaust, rightly, back onto the perpetrators. This too is perhaps a purpose to which traditional historical research is unsuited, as Pollin-Galay notes, ‘As de-humanists, Holocaust perpetrators are guilty of a crime that cannot be adequately described through traditional forensic accusation’ (2018:108).The implication that both Levi and Pollin-Galay are making here is that guilt and blame are far more questions of philosophy than questions of history: perhaps for Levi testimony of this kind is the only vestibule which can properly hold and articulate these ideas.
The guilt of both perpetrators and victims alike is a topic Levi does not shy away from and one which may only be possible to discuss in a work like The Drowned and the Saved. In the case of perpetrators, Levi mostly asserts that their guilt is a certainty, it is a matter of the degree of guilt rather than guilt itself. For victims, however, Levi makes it clear that he is unsure how much is justified or simply a result of the nature of trauma, as he writes that, ‘on a rational plane, there should not have been much to be ashamed of, but shame persisted nevertheless… almost everybody feels guilty of having omitted to offer help’ (2013:81-82). Levi’s sentiment here correlates with a phenomenon Lisa McCann and Laurie Anne Pearlman identify in adult survivors of trauma as they describe
Richard Lazarus’s (1966) transactional model of stress. He defines stress as the discrepancy between the demands of the situation and the individual’s perceived ability to meet those demands (1990:12).
From revealing admissions like these then, could literary testimonies like Levi’s also have a personal function as well as a societal one? Within The Drowned and the Saved, Levi breaks the ‘stereotyped picture’ that ‘at the end of the storm, when ‘the quiet after the storm’ arrives, all hearts rejoice’ (2013:72), the implication being that he, and many other survivors of the Holocaust, carried their trauma with them away from the camp and beyond. In this way, while Levi may not be writing the traumatic testimony of those who died in the Holocaust, he is instead documenting a different testimony: that of those who survived it. Perhaps for Levi, his testimony is meant to function as cathartic for the survivors as well as well as an act of remembrance for the dead. More than this though, perhaps the act of writing itself is shown as therapeutic for those suffering traumas, as Paul Bailey writes in the introduction to The Drowned and the Saved:
Levi lived a zombie-like existence in the months immediately following his liberation,
he made the momentous decision to confront his fearsome memories with the aid of words (2013: xi).
Perhaps much of The Drowned and the Saved in part acts as a vessel through which Levi can formulate and articulate his own unanswered questions about his experience.
Levi notes that he, and many others like him, have the recurring thought that when thinking about what they could have done:
you too could have, you certainly should have; and this is a judgement that the survivor believes he sees in the eyes of those (especially the young) who listen to his stories, and judge with facile hindsight (2013:81).
The most interesting aspect in this passage is the emphasis Levi places upon the judgement of children, since Wendy Lower gives us the anecdote that,
Levi wanted to impart some of the themes of his writings to youth, but the more he spoke with students, the more disillusioned he became. Students repeatedly asked him questions that bedevilled him, such as why did the Holocaust happen… He concluded that his own experience could not be easily reduced to life lessons (2009:99).
The importance of this experience with children cannot be understated; in his conclusion, Levi writes the overarching question Holocaust survivors are asked, and his own answer:
we are asked by the young who our ‘torturers’ were, of what cloth they were made…they were made of our same cloth, they were average human beings, averagely intelligent, averagely wicked: save for exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces, but they had been reared badly (2013:234).
The normality Levi emphasises here as being the SS’ defining feature echoes sentiments put forth by Hannah Ardent and from which she coined the banality of evil. This may be the greatest lesson Holocaust testimony can impart, that though the Holocaust was a unique event, it was not perpetrated by unique people. Perhaps, as well, the most imperative function of Holocaust testimony is to warn the young, the coming generations removed from the Holocaust by time, of this fact. This is why Holocaust testimony has altered in its forms and its function. This is not to say that historical documentation is not also of vital importance, but literary Holocaust testimony is simply able to impart the emotional realities which history is ill-equipped to impart itself. The breadth of sources and dialogue around the Holocaust is what will hopefully ensure that these stories are not just told, but understood, for generations.
References
Eaglestone, R. (2004) “‘Not Read and Consumed in the Same Way as Other Books’: Identification and the Genre of Testimony” from Eaglestone, R. (2008) The Holocaust and the Postmodern. Pp. 15-41, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge.
Kulka, O. (2014) Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination. London: Penguin.
Laub, D. and Hamburger, A. (eds.) (2017) Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony: Unwanted Memories of Social Trauma. New York: Routledge.
Levi, P. (2013) The Drowned and the Saved. London: Abacus.
Matthaus, J. (2009) Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and its Transformations. New York: Oxford University Press.
McCann, L. and Pearlman, L. (1990) Brunner/ Mazel Psychological Stress Series No. 21: Psychological Trauma and the Adult Survivor: Theory, Therapy, and Transformation. London: Routledge.
Pollin-Galay, H. (2018) Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Stone, D. (2014) ‘History, Memory, Testimony.’ In Rowland, A. and Kilby, J. (eds.) The Future of Testimony: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Witnessing. New York: Routledge, pp. 17-21.
Kaiser, M. (2010) The Holocaust’s Uneasy Relationship with Literature. [Online] [Accessed 18th December 2018] https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/12/the-holocausts-uneasy-relationship-with-literature/67998/
Richardson, A. (2005) The Ethical Limitations of Holocaust Literary Representation. [Online] [Accessed 18th December 2018] https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_41171_en.pdf
Bibliography
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