This book consists of ten essays that examine the ways in which language has been used to evoke what Lawrence L. Langer calls the 'deathscape' and the 'hopescape' of the Holocaust. The chapters in this collection probe the diverse impacts that site visits, memoirs, survivor testimonies, psychological studies, literature and art have on our response to the atrocities committed by the Germans during World War II. Langer also considers the misunderstandings caused by erroneous, embellished and sentimental accounts of the catastrophe, and explores some reasons why they continue to enter public and printed discourse with such ease.

The three works considered in Hierarchy and Mutuality in Paradise Lost, Moby-Dick and The Brothers Karamazov display a striking overlap in their concern with hierarchy and mutuality as parallel and often intersecting way of how human beings relate to each other and to divine forces in the universe. All three contain adversarial protagonists whose stature often commands admiration from audiences less ready to confront their motives and deeds than to be swayed by their verbal harangues. Why the quest for personal power should disturb the serenity of mutual love with such compelling force is an issue that Milton, Melville and Dostoevsky address with varying degrees of self-consciousness. In their texts the seeds of disaster seem to sprout in both spiritual and barren soil, sometimes nurtured by a hierarchy that gave them birth, at others in reaction against a hierarchy that would stifle their energy. The purpose of this study is to analyze the origins and the consequences of such tensions.

This book consists of ten essays that examine the ways in which language has been used to evoke what Lawrence L. Langer calls the 'deathscape' and the 'hopescape' of the Holocaust. The chapters in this collection probe the diverse impacts that site visits, memoirs, survivor testimonies, psychological studies, literature and art have on our response to the atrocities committed by the Germans during World War II. Langer also considers the misunderstandings caused by erroneous, embellished and sentimental accounts of the catastrophe, and explores some reasons why they continue to enter public and printed discourse with such ease.

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.

"In the evening I had to prepare food and cook supper, which exhausted me totally. In politics there's absolutely nothing new. Again, out of impatience I feel myself beginning to fall into melancholy. There is really no way out of this for us." This is Dawid Sierakowiak's final diary entry. Soon after writing it, the young author died of tuberculosis, exhaustion, and starvation--the Holocaust syndrome known as "ghetto disease."

After the liberation of the Lódz Ghetto, Dawid's notebooks were found stacked on a cookstove, ready to be burned for heat. Young Sierakowiak was one of more than 60,000 Jews who perished in that notorious urban slave camp, a man-made hell which was the longest surviving concentration of Jews in Nazi Europe. The diary comprises a remarkable legacy left to humanity by its teenage author. It is one of the most fastidiously detailed accounts ever rendered of modern life in human bondage.

The luxury of life was never returned to Dawid, but a new awareness of its richness can be our reward for reading the diary of this brilliantly deserving and brutally deprived young human being.

Lawrence L. Langer, perhaps the most important literary critic of the Holocaust, here explores the use of Holocaust themes in literature, memoirs, film, and painting. Among the authors he examines are Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Cynthia Ozick, Art Spiegelman, and Simon Wiesenthal. He appraises the art of Samuel Bak, considered by many the premier Holocaust painter of our time, and assesses the "Holocaust Project" by Judy Chicago. He also offers a critical interpretation of Undzere Kinder, a neglected but important Yiddish film made in Poland after the war about Holocaust orphans. Langer focuses his attention on a variety of controversial issues: the attempt of a number of commentators to appropriate the subject of the Holocaust for private moral agendas; the ordeal of women in the concentration camps; the conflicting claims of individual and community survival in the Kovno ghetto; the current tendency to conflate the Holocaust with other modern atrocities, thereby blurring the distinctive features of each; and the sporadic impulse to shift the emphasis from the crime, the criminals, and the victimized to the question of forgiveness and the need for healing. He concludes with some reflections on the challenge of teaching the Holocaust to generations of students who know less and less of its history but continue to manifest an eager curiosity about its human impact and psychological roots.

The immense service that Langer's careful, thoughtful, immensely intelligent and restrained study renders is that the esthetics of atrocity cease to be an exclusive domain of the victims. Many of his writers are not Jewish and several were not imprisoned or interned, and yet all of them have been driven by the death-camp universe. The atrocity of that time and the atrocities that have succeeded Auschwitz represent a continuity that may almost be called a new tradition, one in which the phantasmagoric and horrific is real and the gentle and generous a prodigy to be remarked with amazement. "The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination is a pioneering work of criticism for it impels us, readers and writers alike, to inquire after the basic paradox: how can literature delight and transfix or warn and modify a humanity from whom nothing is hidden, nothing prohibited, for whom nothing is shocking or unreal." -Arthur A. Cohen, New York Times Book Review "A stimulating, perceptive study of the literature of the Holocaust.... Langer's examination of possible stylistic approaches to the subject, from the delicate whimsy of Aichinger to the graphic bestiality of Kosinski's The Painted Bird is in each case detailed and subtle." -The New Republic

This book is a tribute to the artist's return to his birthplace, to the place of his childhood, once filled with happiness; to the streets of his tenuous survival during World War II, and to the memorial for his grandparents and father. Bak's journey was marked by memories and profound sadness and a great awareness of his responsibility to express the spirits of all who were destroyed during the Holocaust. Scholar Lawrence L. Langer provides commentary on the rich symbolic significance and uniqueness of the artist's work.

The memoir of Charlotte Delbo, a French writer sent to Auschwitz for her resistance activities against the Nazi occupation of France and the Vichy government "Delbo's exquisite and unflinching account of life and death under Nazi atrocity grows fiercer and richer with time."-Sara R. Horowitz, York University Charlotte Delbo's moving memoir of life and death in Auschwitz and the postwar trauma of survivors, Auschwitz and After, is now a classic of Holocaust literature. Offering the rare perspective of a non-Jew, Delbo records moments of horror and of desperate efforts at mutual support, of the everyday deprivation and abuse experienced by everyone in the camps, and especially by children. Auschwitz and After conveys how a survivor must "carry the word" and continue to live after surviving one of the greatest catastrophes of the twentieth century. This second edition includes an updated and expanded introduction by Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer. "No memoir of those times is more sensitive and less sentimental."-Geoffrey Hartman "I find Rosette C. Lamont's remarkable translation of Charlotte Delbo's work perceptive, delicate, and poignant, in short: exceptional."-Elie Wiesel "Delbo's exquisite and unflinching account of life and death under Nazi atrocity grows fiercer and richer with time. The superb new introduction by Lawrence L. Langer illuminates the subtlety and complexity of Delbo's meditation on memory, time, culpability, and survival, in the context of what Langer calls the 'afterdeath' of the Holocaust. Delbo's powerful trilogy belongs on every bookshelf."-Sara R. Horowitz, York University Winner of the 1995 American Literary Translators Association Award