With a highly sensitive but unsparing eye, these essays argue that
new moral and linguistic categories are required in order to
respond properly and honestly to the reality of the Holocaust.
Langer (English/Simmons College), who won a National Book Critics
Circle award for Holocaust Testimonies (1991), asserts that
"language preserves a semblance of order that disintegrates" in the
reality of the mass slaughter of Jews. Analyzing the ways in which
people have tried to understand or represent the Holocaust, he
looks at oral testimony, diaries, memoirs, and fiction, including
works by writers like William Styron and Bernard Malamud for whom
the Holocaust is an important but not necessarily central theme.
Langer also examines some portrayals of the Holocaust on American
TV, stage, and screen, eloquently resisting attempts to
sentimentalize Holocaust victims, resisters, or survivors. Above
all, he insists that the Holocaust represents a "rupture" in the
images and values of modern Western culture, several times
approvingly quoting Jean Amery's observation that "no bridge led
from death in Auschwitz to Death in Venice." Langer's only
questionable contention is that "Auschwitz introduced the realm of
the unthinkable into the human drama." What, one wonders, of the
mass deaths of millions during WW I's trench warfare or Stalin's
murder of as many as 30 million in the USSR during the purges?
Generally, however, Langer writes superbly. He has a gift for
simple yet resonant phrasing: Of fictional survivors such as Aharon
Appelfeld's Great Barfuss and Cynthia Ozick's Rosa, he writes that
they are emotionally and spiritually "dead while alive" and thus
"amputated from time." Langer applies his insightful, razor-sharp
pen to others' works about an event that, he convincingly
maintains, carries neither lesson nor moral but instead overpowers
memory, mocks the pretensions of civilization, and leaves an
absurd, irredeemable legacy. (Kirkus Reviews)
In Admitting the Holocaust Langer presents a series of essays that represent his effort, over nearly a decade, to wrestle with this rupture in human values--and to see the Holocaust as it really was. Langer examines the ways in which accounts of the Holocaust--in history, literature, film, and theology--have extended, and sometimes limited, our insight into an event that is often said to defy understanding itself. A respected Holocaust scholar, Langer offers a view of this catastrophe that is candid and disturbing, and yet hopeful in its belief that the testimony of witnesses--in diaries, journals, memoirs, and on videotape--and the unflinching imagination of literary artists can still offer us access to one of the darkest episodes in the twentieth century.
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