Forgetting to Remember : Religious Remembrance and the Literary Response to the Holocaust 9780853038290, 9780853038399

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Sheridan Marshall’s ambitious and sensitive study attempts to identify, articulate and recuperate forms of remembrance of the Holocaust by drawing on six texts from six authors representing the three chief literary genres of lyric (Paul Celan, Geoffrey Hill), epic (Imre Kertész, Günter Grass), and drama (Peter Weiss, Samuel Beckett). The key terms which Marshall assembles are actualisation, remembrance, confession (in poetry), anamnesis (in prose), and testament (in drama). The idea driving the argument is a desanctification of religious forms of remembrance: even writers who profess no faith, whether Jewish or Christian, are writing from agnostic or atheistic positions, but also out of religious discourses which have shaped or determined cultural understanding. The authors use a syntax of ‘understanding’ or attempting to come to terms, provisionally, with the Holocaust and with culture and life after Auschwitz. The underlying impetus is ultimately one of non-closure. The book is rigorously and transparently structured; stylistically it is fluently and lucidly written. It is a welcome contribution to our understanding of the catastrophe which challenges understanding. Leonard Olschner, Centenary Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London

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VALLENTINE MITCHELL

Middlesex House 29/45 High Street Edgware, Middlesex HA8 7UU, UK www.vmbooks.com

920 NE 58th Avenue Suite 300 Portland, OR 97213-3786 USA

ISBN 978 0 85303 839 9

SHERIDAN MARSHALL

VA L L E N T I N E M I T C H E L L

FORGETTING TO REMEMBER

Sheridan Marshall studied at UCL, Cambridge and Royal Holloway, University of London before working as a freelance writer, editor and translator.

VALLENTINE MITCHELL

FORGETTING TO REMEMBER

Religious Remembrance and the Literary Response to the Holocaust

Forgetting to Remember examines the remembrance of the Holocaust in literary texts by six European writers: Paul Celan, Geoffrey Hill, Günter Grass, Imre Kertész, Peter Weiss and Samuel Beckett. Close readings of canonical texts such as Grass’s The Tin Drum and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in conjunction with less well-known works, like Kertész’s Kaddish for a Child Not Born, reveal fresh insights about the ethical and aesthetic challenges of representing the Holocaust. We see how the simultaneous reliance upon and rejection of religious forms of remembrance in the literary texts results in a disconsolate remembrance of the Holocaust which is sensitive to the impossibility of adequately remembering the millions of victims. Drawing upon a wide range of scholarship, Forgetting to Remember considers the longstanding relationship between remembrance and religion. It proposes correspondences between the remembrance of the Holocaust in different literary genres – poetry, prose and drama – and various ritual forms of Judaeo-Christian remembrance – confession, anamnesis and testament. While religious remembrance occurs in relation to God, the authors of literary texts written in response to the Holocaust commonly reject the possibility of a theological address after Auschwitz. The perceived failure of religious remembrance during and after the Holocaust offers a way of remembering which remains conscious of its own insufficiency in relation to the sufferings and deaths of the victims. Emmanuel Levinas’s work on intersubjective ethical relations provides insights into how the literary acts of address function, offering a residual hope for ethical and political transformation after the Holocaust. Forgetting to Remember presents new comparative analyses of literary texts, as well as being the first sustained examination of the formal associations between religious remembrance and the literary remembrance of the Holocaust. Its wide-ranging conclusions will be significant for researchers in Holocaust Studies and will also interest those working in the fields of modern languages, English literature and theology.

SHERIDAN MARSHALL ISBN 978 0 85303 839 9

FORGETTING TO REMEMBER

Forgetting to Remember: Religious Remembrance and the Literary Response to the Holocaust

SHERIDAN MARSHALL

VALLENTINE MITCHELL LONDON • PORTLAND, OR

First published in 2014 by Vallentine Mitchell Middlesex House, 29/45 High Street, Edgware, Middlesex HA8 7UU, UK

920 NE 58th Avenue, Suite 300 Portland, Oregon, 97213-3786 USA

www.vmbooks.com Copyright © Sheridan Marshall 2014

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: An entry can be found on request

ISBN 978 0 85303 839 9 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 85303 929 0 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data An entry can be found on request

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, reading or otherwise, without the prior permission of Vallentine Mitchell & Co. Ltd.

Printed by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: The Desanctification of Remembrance

vii 1

1. Forms of Remembrance

15

2. Poetry as Confession: Paul Celan and Geoffrey Hill

53

3. Novelistic Prose as Anamnesis: Günter Grass and Imre Kertész

107

4. Drama as Testament: Peter Weiss and Samuel Beckett

159

Conclusion: Remembrance as Disconsolation

219

References

233

Index

251

Acknowledgements

M

y research for this book was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and its publication was assisted by a generous grant from the Association of German Studies. It could not have been written without the unstinting support of my parents, family and friends or the inspirational and challenging interventions of Professor Andrew Bowie at Royal Holloway, University of London, to whom I am profoundly grateful. Thanks and much more are due to my wonderful husband Doug, and to our children, Jacob, Samuel, Daniel and Lauren. The following materials are reproduced by kind permission of the copyright holders: Excerpts from The Orchards of Syon by Geoffrey Hill, © 2002 by Geoffrey Hill. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Excerpts from ‘Tenebrae’, ‘Funeral Music’, ‘Merlin’, ‘The Bidden Guest’, ‘Canticle for Good Friday’, ‘September Song’, ‘History as Poetry’ and ‘The Pentecost Castle’ from New & Collected Poems 1952–1992 by Geoffrey Hill, © 1994 by Geoffrey Hill. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from The Triumph of Love by Geoffrey Hill, © 1998 by Geoffrey Hill. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. ‘Tenebrae’ by Paul Celan is taken from Poems of Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger. Translation © 1972, 1980, 1988, 2002 by Michael Hamburger. Reprinted by permission of Persea Books, Inc., New York, and Anvil Press Poetry. Third edition published by Anvil Press Poetry in 2007. A substantial extract from Chapter Two was first published as S. Burnside, ‘The “Tenebrae” Poems of Paul Celan and Geoffrey Hill’, in P. Pennington and M. Sperling (eds), Geoffrey Hill and His Contexts (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), pp.151–70.

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Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from German sources are my own.

Introduction

The Desanctification of Remembrance The questions of how the Holocaust can and should be remembered, in literature and in general, were first asked by some of the people who were persecuted in the Holocaust, even during their experiences of persecution. The same questions have been raised repeatedly since 1945, not only by the authors of literature responding to the Holocaust, but also by people writing about the literature, and by philosophers, theologians, social theorists and others writing about the consequences of the Holocaust for the way we live after it. These questions deserve to be posed again, not because many of the previous attempts to address them have not been rigorous and thoroughgoing, but because such studies have always urged the manifold risks of apparently neat answers and the desirability of an ongoing debate which will ensure that the problems of remembering the Holocaust remain current. In a sense, then, reiterating questions about the possibility and appropriateness of Holocaust remembrance is part of the response to the questions themselves. Part of the ‘answer’ to the question of how the Holocaust can be remembered is to keep asking the question, because there is no easy or adequate solution. There are parallels with the methodology of the Talmudic interpreters who do not seek by their reinterpretations to resolve textual difficulties, but rather to increase and to enrich the variety of possible responses to the Jewish law. By reiterating in this book the questions about how we can and should remember the Holocaust in literature, and approaching them from within a different context, namely the Judaeo-Christian tradition of remembrance, I hope to extend and deepen the existing debate. Literary responses to the Holocaust tend to be predicated upon the idea of a responsibility of remembrance towards those who suffered and died during it. Yet why should we remember the victims of the

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Holocaust? Why should people write about remembering it? And why write about the writing about the memory of the Holocaust? Questions such as these can sound almost sacrilegious in the context of what the Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir has referred to as the ‘memory industry’ surrounding the Holocaust.1 Ophir’s critique of Holocaust memory reflects his view of the need for more discerning approaches to remembrance. Ophir maintains that the Holocaust has been subject to a process of ‘sanctification’ within Israeli society which legitimates a corresponding tendency towards ritualized acts of remembrance, the automatic participation in which detracts from rather than reinforces the moral value of remembrance.2 In the years since Ophir made his observations the ‘Holocaust industry’3 has expanded throughout Europe and America, resulting in both the further ritualization of remembrance, and a proliferation of the questioning of the ways in which remembrance occurs. In this book I argue that the desanctification of remembrance which some literary responses to the Holocaust bring about establishes the possibility for questioning not only the ritualization of memory but even the value of the remembrance of the Holocaust itself, without thereby demeaning the sufferings of the victims. The uneasy remembrance which results from this kind of literary self-examination is thereby a more appropriate memorial response to the Holocaust than one which does not critically engage with its own premises. The view that the Holocaust ought not to be remembered, either at all or as much, used to be the public preserve of the German right. Most left-leaning commentators believed, more or less, in an inviolable duty to remember those who were murdered and made to suffer at the hands of the Nazis, as the primary moral action now available in relation to them. All other moral acts following from the Holocaust such as the duty of care towards Holocaust survivors, the duty of educating people that the Holocaust happened, and about how and why it happened, and the duty of ensuring that it does not happen again can be derived from this primary obligation of remembrance. Writing in May 1985, shortly after President Reagan and Chancellor Kohl’s controversial visit to the military cemetery at Bitburg which contained graves of members of the SS, Jürgen Habermas uses the phrase Erpresste Versöhnung (‘enforced reconciliation’) – the title of an essay on a different subject by Theodor W. Adorno – to characterize the coercive expectations of memorial reconciliation among German politicians. Habermas observes that Chancellor Kohl’s anticipation of remembrance of the past leading to present forgiveness is especially

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inappropriate given the way in which his selectively commemorative actions are in fact motivated by forgetfulness.4 In recent years the debate about the memory of the Holocaust in Germany has become more complicated with the increasing recognition of the legitimacy of also remembering the sufferings of German civilians during the Second World War. One of the challenges for contemporary literature is to find ways of negotiating these kind of multiple and sometimes conflicting memorial obligations. My research focuses on how in the literary response to the Holocaust, by contrast with politically motivated remembrance, remembrance is not associated with reconciliation, but rather is allowed to remain unreconciled. The question of the value of remembering the Holocaust is frequently juxtaposed with considerations about the conversely valuable senses of forgetting. Given the traumatic nature of what there is to remember about the Holocaust, and its potentially debilitating effect upon people who remember it, shouldn’t we rather welcome the possibilities of forgetting? As Jeffrey Blustein writes, The morally significant questions about remembering do not simply have to do with whether we should remember or not … [W]e can plausibly say that the responsibility to remember must be regulated and tempered by an appreciation of the need to forget, to shift whatever portion of the past is at issue away from the center and toward the periphery of our constellation of concerns.5 Blustein acknowledges the particular ethical difficulties of privileging forgetting in the post-Holocaust context, ‘where memory, however painful its contents, is prized, socially sanctioned, and even sanctified’.6 While some of the arguments against remembering the Holocaust are premised on the idea of remembrance as a debt to the dead which is not worth paying because of the extent of the sacrifice it demands from the living, the best arguments for remembering it combine a due respect for those who have died and are to be remembered with a desire to integrate this respect with concern for the living. In these conceptions of remembrance concern about forgetting the dead is thus always also a concern about what effects forgetting to remember those who have died might have upon the living. Literary responses to remembering the Holocaust, including the texts I consider in this study, are written not only in memoriam and against forgetting, but also to counter forgetting to remember. In their

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privileging of discussions about the processes of remembrance itself, reminding us that, like forgetting, remembrance too can become a habit within which its value as a moral duty to the dead is undermined, they urge their readers to remember to remember. Remembering the Holocaust is a process which cannot adequately be fulfilled in a single act of remembrance. But if an individual act of remembering produces not only remembrance, but the attitude of remembering to remember – via the consciousness it generates of the inadequacy of any isolated memorial act, including itself – it will come closer to creating the condition of disconsolation necessarily attendant upon the remembrance of the Holocaust. In the literary approaches to remembering the Holocaust that I examine here, in the course of their reinterpretation of ritual forms of Judaeo-Christian remembrance which foregrounds the necessary failure of these forms after the Holocaust, remembrance of the Holocaust is explicitly desanctified. The texts generate a disconsolate remembrance in which the remembering subject resists not only forgetting, but the possibilities of deriving comfort from the act of remembrance itself. The challenges generated by the Holocaust for debates about the relative value of remembering and forgetting mean that the questions about the possibilities of the memorialization and narrative representation of the Holocaust addressed by historical and literary writers overlap more than is usually the case in relation to other historical events. The historiographical approach to the Holocaust is partly conducted along traditional historical lines about the chronological parameters of the ‘Final Solution’ and the relative significance of the various Nazi policies and policy-makers in bringing it about, but is partly also a discussion about the challenges which narrativizing the Holocaust poses to the nature of historiography itself. Saul Friedländer describes the process of writing the history of Nazi Germany’s persecution of the Jews in which, ‘this history, in order to be written at all, has to be represented as the integrated narration of individual fates’.7 Friedländer is talking here about the history of the victims, whose memories he seeks to rescue from the ‘abstract statistical expression’ of their collective fate, through his particular style of history writing. Dan Diner argues, on the other hand, that ‘gauged in terms of the victims’ experience, Auschwitz has no appropriate narrative, only a set of statistics’.8 For the millions of people murdered in the gas chambers there is no story left to tell and, insofar as it is possible for us to imagine their experience of death in this manner (and this is almost not possible), the experience makes no

The Desanctification of Remembrance

5

more sense than that of an isolated statistic. Friedländer’s way of responding to this problem is to try to reconstruct a selection of individual narratives out of the vacuum of narrative material, while recognizing that this is neither a representative nor a sufficient response. What is at stake is the balance between the extreme difficulty of characterizing the experience of the Holocaust for those people who were murdered during it, and the need to have some kind of story to tell, history to write and something called the Holocaust which those who live after it can remember. Friedländer accepts Dominick LaCapra’s theory of ‘transference’ as an inevitable concern for any historian writing about the Holocaust.9 According to LaCapra, ‘transference basically means implication in the problems one treats, implication that involves repetition, in one’s own approach or discourse, of forces or movements active in those problems’.10 LaCapra’s neo-Freudian approach to Holocaust memory is based on the particularly traumatic and emotional content of what there is to remember about the victims’ experiences of the Holocaust. He claims that ‘the contagiousness of trauma’ means that, even if they did not experience it themselves, the person remembering the Holocaust will be bound to succumb to a repetitive and unproductive involvement with the past, with which they will only be able to come to terms by ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ the trauma. For LaCapra, ‘working through’ the past means acquiring that distance from it which is necessary in order to establish ‘the possibility of being an ethical and political agent’.11 Adorno maintains in his essay, ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’, that working through the past in Germany, particularly in relation to the use of the term Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (‘working through the past’), is frequently an attempt to abandon the past rather than to confront its implications for life after it.12 LaCapra’s thesis is sensitive to this concern since the distance he wants us to maintain between the past and the present is explicitly not forgetting, but rather a distance which enables us to learn to live responsibly with the memory of the past. This distance is like the one I suggest above between the act of remembering and that of remembering to remember. LaCapra’s thesis shows a way out of the claim that remembering the Holocaust is necessarily psychologically damaging, and stresses the ethical dimensions that should be central to remembrance, regardless of who is remembering. When historians are already deeply concerned to scrutinize the processes by which their historical narratives are constructed, what added value do literary accounts of the Holocaust offer? Why should

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we rely upon literary responses to the Holocaust to find out about how it was and to guide our remembrance? Firstly, it should be obvious that the decision to read one type of narrative of the Holocaust ought not to exclude the other: history and literature each have something to contribute to our understanding of the experiences of the Holocaust, as experiences so fraught that no attempt to illuminate them should be disregarded lightly. Secondly, there is a view of art, including literature, which emphasizes its particular ability to bring us to contemplate otherwise unimaginable realities. This view is summarized by Iris Murdoch, whose theoretical contributions to discussions about remembering the Holocaust in literature are complemented by the Holocaust survivors who appear as characters in her novels. Michael Hollington compares the contingent moral-philosophical world in Murdoch’s fiction with that of Günter Grass.13 As part of a ‘hymn of praise’ to art, Murdoch describes how, ‘Art illuminates accident and contingency and the general muddle of life, the limitations of time and the discursive intellect, so as to enable us to survey complex or horrible things which would otherwise appal us’.14 According to this conception, literary narrative will be able to take us further towards understanding what it was to experience the Holocaust than historical narrative. Literature has traditionally been more concerned than history with engaging with the particularity of human experiences of suffering, although as Friedländer’s approach to writing the history of the Holocaust demonstrates, this is no longer necessarily a clear basis for distinguishing between the two sorts of writing. Adorno describes suffering as a condition of how we understand truth: since suffering is the most particular and individual of human experiences, attempts to understand the sufferings of others are the closest we can get to recognizing their otherness, their difference from ourselves.15 Remembering the Holocaust as an ethical duty towards the victims seeks, through the affective capacity of memory, to recognize others’ suffering in this way. Literary texts, because they potentially give more effective voice to the sufferings of others than historical narrative – and because, even if the distinctions between historical and literary texts are more fluid after the Holocaust, they are still often read with the expectation of this sort of potential – might stimulate a remembrance which engages more fully with the Holocaust victims’ experiences. As well as providing insights into others’ experiences of suffering during the Holocaust which might otherwise remain closed to us,

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literary responses to the Holocaust offer exceptional perspectives about how such sufferings might be articulated. This is because, in addition to engaging with the sorts of overlapping concerns about remembering the Holocaust discussed above, and in ways which are bound up with these intellectual engagements, literary texts also register their responses to the Holocaust at various linguistic levels. This book focuses on the significance of the textual structures of address – the literary acts of saying in relation to various conceptions of their intertextual addressee(s) – within the memorial responses to the Holocaust in different literary genres. As part of their response to what happened during the Holocaust and in ways which are related to the different sorts of address operational in poetry, prose and drama, literary texts reinterpret the structures of address in Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance. Their reconfiguration of religious remembrance frequently involves the contesting or even dismissal of traditional conceptions of the relationship between man and God upon which Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance are predicated. Theological doubt after the Holocaust is connected with linguistic uncertainties about the possibility and appropriateness of bearing witness to what happened during the Holocaust via the similar modes of address involved in each type of witnessing. The reinterpretation of religious forms of remembrance is thus part of the literary demonstration of the inevitable inadequacy of its own – and almost any other – memorial response, which thereby contributes to the desanctification of the conception of remembrance itself. In a relatively early review of the literary critical studies of Holocaust literature, David G. Roskies takes issue with the way in which literary critics consistently resort to religious categories in their discussion of the texts: If the ghetto Jews and the handful of survivors felt the overwhelming need for consolation, that is surely their prerogative. But the critic has no such right. Poetry is not prayer, criticism is not theology … In seeking to express their sense of moral outrage, the critics have set the Holocaust apart from the world on the basis of history, but they quickly lose patience with history and fall back on a pietistic mode.16 Roskies objects to the uncritical implications of ‘explaining’ Holocaust literature in theological terms. James Young similarly observes that many critics of Holocaust literature have interpreted their role as

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analogous to that of Biblical exegetes, of protecting texts from ‘“heretical” readings’.17 While I consider the significance of some of the views of Holocaust literature which present it as a kind of theological undertaking, this study does not extend those claims. I am concerned rather with the ways in which the literary texts themselves rely upon, and in so doing, necessarily also point to the inadequacy of Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance after the Holocaust. As Roskies observes elsewhere: Despite well-meaning attempts to ascribe sanctity to the literature of the Holocaust – by comparing it to midrash, by seeking parallels between the Hebrew Bible and the Holocaust as translation phenomena – Holocaust literature is a resolutely secular enterprise, never more so than when it waxes liturgical.18 Although some of the individual texts I consider have previously been analysed in terms of their engagement with religious themes and how these relate to their representation of the Holocaust, this study is primarily concerned with the formal relationships between the structures of address in the religious and literary modes of remembrance, and how religious remembrance is reconfigured in these relationships as a variously desanctified remembrance. In Chapter One I consider the etymological, structural and functional relationships between remembrance and religion in order to establish the basis for my discussion of the literary desanctification of remembrance in relation to the Holocaust in subsequent chapters. The term ‘Judaeo-Christian’ is used extensively throughout this book and, far from being a reductive or grudging acknowledgement of Christianity’s Jewish heritage, is intended to communicate the inextricable connection between Christian and Jewish forms of remembrance. My consideration of some of the dominant conceptions of remembrance in the Hebrew Bible and their continuing significance within Christian forms of remembrance shows connections between the Jewish and Christian memorial traditions which are not always taken into account in discussions of the literary remembrance of the Holocaust. As I show in the following chapters, the Biblical understanding of remembrance as Vergegenwärtigung (‘actualization’) is relevant to a number of authors’ methodological formulations of the literary requirement to remember the Holocaust, and consequently to my analysis of the ways in which the literary texts reinterpret and desanctify particular Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance. A

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significant aspect of the process of the desanctification of memory which occurs in the literary texts is related to the understanding that, after the Holocaust, as A. Roy Eckardt writes, ‘The Christian memory is an afflicted memory’.19 Remembering Jewish suffering during the Holocaust within a framework of Christian sacramental remembrance such as confession or Eucharistic anamnesis, entails the moral and political recognition that, given the long history of Christian antiSemitism which contributed to making the Holocaust possible, and the extent of Christian complicity with the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews, Christian modes of remembrance after the Holocaust cannot carry on unchanged. Christian remembrance cannot now be justified if it does not extend to the memory of the Jews who suffered and died during the Holocaust; it is also necessary for it to be more explicit about its own origins in the Hebrew Bible. These insights are evident, in varying degrees, in texts by all the authors discussed in this study. Young observes that ‘Religious meaning and significance … are simultaneously reflected and generated in Holocaust narrative’.20 There has been little attention to date either to how such meaning and significance are produced in Holocaust literature, or to the literary concern with the insignificance of religious meaning. This study examines both these aspects of literary responses to the Holocaust in order to illuminate the operation of the remembrance of the Holocaust itself. In Chapter Two I characterize Paul Celan’s and Geoffrey Hill’s poetry in terms of confession because of the predominance of the oneto-one structure of address in their poetic texts which becomes a version of address to God or the absence of God. In Chapter Three I examine the remembrance of the Holocaust in the novelistic prose writing of Günter Grass and Imre Kertész in terms of its reinterpretation of the communal structure of address in Eucharistic anamnesis. In Chapter Four I consider the ways in which the dramatic address of play-texts by Peter Weiss and Samuel Beckett can be regarded as a testament, in terms of the Biblical testament and in connection with the testimonial context of the oral testimonies of Holocaust survivors. All the authors I consider share the view that Judaeo-Christian forms fail to fulfil the literary demands of Holocaust remembrance, but that this failure is the source of their ongoing significance, since part of the challenge of responding to the Holocaust, which their texts enact in confessional, anamnestic and testamentary forms, is to communicate the failure of available theological and linguistic means to carry out that response. The texts enact remembrance of the Holocaust in forms of address which, in

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their lack of any attendant sense of the possibility of divine absolution, necessarily produce a desanctified remembrance. Michael G. Levine eloquently characterizes what is at stake in the testimonial address of Holocaust writing in the introduction to The Belated Witness, where he sets out the ethical dimensions of the responsibility of bearing witness to the witness with extensive reference to Celan’s poetological writings.21 While my study shares Levine’s focus on the act of address in Holocaust literature, I examine ‘the constative dimension’ of that address which is explicitly not Levine’s concern.22 Levine seeks ‘to reorient the study of Holocaust literature and survivor testimony, shifting the focus from the often sacralizing and awestruck language of the “unspeakable” toward an investigation of what transpires in the unstable borderland between speech and silence, body and text’.23 This book, on the other hand, is attentive precisely to the ‘sacralizing’ potential of the linguistic acts of address, which I understand as part of the condition of possibility for those acts, even though the literary conceptions of address are more commonly derived from an understanding of the impossibility of theological address. The literary sense of the inadequacy of theological relations after the Holocaust results in desacralized forms of testimonial address in response to the Holocaust. By virtue of the ritual contexts which inform the ways in which the Holocaust is remembered in the texts I consider, these texts convey a heightened awareness of the danger of the failure of ritual forms of Judaeo-Christian remembrance – as well as the desanctified literary versions themselves – to attend to the particular sufferings of those to whom remembrance is owed. By paying attention to how the Holocaust is remembered in the address of literary testimonies, then, readers can potentially be more aware of the implications of what is being remembered for their conduct after it, and thereby better fulfil the duty of Holocaust remembrance itself by living in ways which are predicated upon the necessity of not forgetting to remember. In its comparative focus on works by pairs of authors who are not often considered in conjunction with one another, and yet, as my research shows, approach the remembrance of the Holocaust in their respective genres in complementary ways, this book presents new ways of understanding their texts. In Chapters Two, Three and Four I initially consider the respective authors’ methodological statements regarding the literary responsibilities of remembering the Holocaust specific to poetry, prose and drama. The authors considered here reflect on the acts of address in their writings in ways which are

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paradigmatic for my claims about the literary reinterpretation of the structures of address in Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance. Young identifies, in relation to diary accounts of the Holocaust, that the ‘structures of narrative … necessarily convert experience into an organized, often ritualized, memory of experience’.24 The textual structures of address are, for the authors I consider, in their reconfiguration of religious ritual contexts, a means of resisting the ritualization of the remembrance of the Holocaust. These texts remain attentive to the dangers of forgetting to remember inherent in ritualized remembrance. While it would certainly be productive to examine other authors’ responses to the Holocaust in the context of my understanding of the desanctification of remembrance, the authors I consider are particularly important for this discussion because of their shared preoccupation with the literary possibilities of address. They are not only concerned with the (in)significance of religious meaning in relation to the remembrance of the Holocaust, but they articulate the consequences of these concerns for the sorts of address entailed by writing in poetry, prose and drama. In each chapter I present examples from the authors’ literary oeuvres which illustrate – and sometimes also complicate – their claims about the ways in which the response to the Holocaust is formulated in their texts, as well as my interpretation of these claims. The selection of literary texts is thus jointly determined by the implications of the authors’ own theoretical writings, and by my understanding of the ways in which their texts reinterpret JudaeoChristian forms of remembrance. By focusing on the structures of address in the literary texts as a significant aspect of their remembrance of the Holocaust and in terms of their formal similarities with the structures of address involved in Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance, I demonstrate a new approach to the question of how the Holocaust can be remembered in literature. In its examination of stylistic aspects of the texts which are often taken for granted or overlooked in critical accounts of their thematic concerns, my approach reveals the interdependencies between theological and linguistic uncertainties involved in the literary responses to the Holocaust. Debates about the memorial responsibilities in relation to the Holocaust and about the ‘sanctification’ of these responsibilities – and even the sanctification of the debates themselves – abound. My research contributes to and extends these debates by suggesting how, in their formal relation to Judaeo-Christian modes of remembrance which they also contest and

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reject, some literary texts accomplish the desanctification of remembrance and thereby prepare their readers for the necessary experience of disconsolation involved in remembering those who suffered and died in the Holocaust. These literary texts avoid the danger of what Habermas refers to as the ‘enforced reconciliation’ of remembering, by resisting the sanctification of remembrance which precedes this step. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

A. Ophir, ‘On Sanctifying the Holocaust: An Anti-Theological Treatise’, Tikkun, 2, no.1 (1987), pp.61–6, see p.61. Ibid., p.63. J. Miller, One, by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p.231. J. Habermas, ‘Die Entsortgung der Vergangenheit: Ein kulturpolitisches Pamphlet’, Die Zeit, 17 May 1985. J. Blustein, The Moral Demands of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p.5. Ibid., p.5. S. Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: the Years of Persecution 1933–39 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), p.5. D. Diner, Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 2000), p.178. See Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, p.6. D. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001), p.142. Ibid., p.144. T.W. Adorno, Eingriffe: Neun kritische Modelle (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), p.125. M. Hollington, Günter Grass: The Writer in a Pluralist Society (London and New Hampshire: Marion Boyars, 1980). I. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), p.8. T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), p.27. D.G. Roskies, ‘The Holocaust According to the Literary Critics’, Prooftexts, 1, no.2 (May 1981), pp.209–16, see p.215. J.E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), p.5. D.G. Roskies, ‘What is Holocaust Literature?’, in E. Lederhendler (ed.), Jews, Catholics, and the Burden of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp.157–212, see p.201. A.R. Eckardt, ‘The Christian World Goes to Bitburg’, in G. Hartman (ed.), Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp.80–9, see p.83.

The Desanctification of Remembrance 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

13

See Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, p.1. M.G. Levine, The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony and the Question of Holocaust Survival (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp.1–15. Ibid., p.5. Ibid., p.2. See Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, p.25.

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Forms of Remembrance

I

n his essay, ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’, which considers how we ought to respond to the social consequences of the Holocaust, Theodor W. Adorno writes that by failing adequately to address the implications of the Holocaust for the way we live after it, ‘The murdered are to be cheated out of the only thing our powerlessness can offer them: remembrance.’1 In common with Adorno, and with most of those who write literary responses to what happened, this book shares the premise of a duty of remembrance owed to those murdered during the Holocaust. Adorno goes on to say that the success or failure of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung depends upon, ‘the way in which the past is actualized [vergegenwärtigt]; whether one continues with mere reproaches or withstands the horror by having the strength to comprehend even the incomprehensible’.2 Whether or not knowing about the Holocaust makes a qualitative difference to the way in which one lives one’s daily life depends upon the sort of intellectual effort which one makes in relation to it. Adorno’s remarks convey the requirement for an active form of remembrance in response to the Holocaust. This is like the remembrance called for by Elie Wiesel, who goes into detail about the nature of the memorial obligation after the Holocaust: ‘anyone who does not actively and continually concern themselves with remembrance and urge others to do the same, is an accomplice to the murder. Conversely, those who resist the crime must stand shoulder to shoulder with the victims and help to circulate their testimonies, their accounts of loneliness and doubt, of silence and defiance.’3 Adorno and Wiesel both insist upon active remembrance of the Holocaust as a necessary moral undertaking. Walter Benjamin is explicit about the requirements of active remembrance in his thesis of ‘historical materialism’ as the most appropriate way of responding to and recounting history, which he outlines in ‘Konvolut N’ of his sprawling work-in-progress Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project). Historical materialism perceives

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Forgetting to Remember

history not in the conventional narrative sense, but in terms of moments of heightened perception that Benjamin terms ‘dialectical images’.4 It is the task of the historical materialist to extract these images from the otherwise homogeneous texture of history.5 Benjamin’s characterization of the founding concept of historical materialism as Aktualisierung (‘actualization’)6 reflects Adorno’s requirement that the past be actualized. Benjamin quotes a letter from Max Horkheimer dated 16 March 1937 which contrasts the presentday consequences of past joys and past suffering. Whereas, Horkheimer writes, people’s positive experiences of the past, of justice and enjoyment, are transient and effectively negated when they die, their experiences of injustice and pain are irreparable and continue to resonate in the present. For Horkheimer, ‘The past injustice has happened and is over. The slain are really slain.’7 Benjamin’s response to Horkheimer’s letter is to outline how this finality of past suffering demands a present response: The corrective to this way of thinking lies in the consideration that history is not just scholarship but is also a form of remembrance. Remembrance can modify what scholarship has ‘concluded’. Remembrance can transform what is unfinished (happiness) into something finished and what is finished (suffering) into something unfinished. That is theology; but the experience of remembrance forbids us from regarding history as fundamentally atheological, even if we cannot try and write history using actual theological concepts.8 By understanding history as a form of remembrance, Benjamin claims, we have an opportunity to attend to the past in such a way as to transform our behaviour in the present and so to make amends for past suffering. We cannot change the past (‘The slain are really slain’) but we can redeem it through our present remembrance. Benjamin’s sense of the redemptive potential of remembrance does not imply that historical injustices will be forgiven, but rather that the sufferings entailed by those injustices will be made to matter again. While in historical scholarship, past sufferings are enumerated and literally recounted, understanding history as remembrance opens up the possibility for the sufferings that are recounted in the study of history to be made to count again in the present. By this conception, historical narrative begins to take on the task of making its readers more aware of others’ sufferings which has traditionally been ascribed to literature.

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Benjamin highlights the theological character of his claim: both Jewish and Christian worship depend on a sense of a salvational potential which is involved in the remembrance of historical suffering. In his essay ‘On the Concept of History’, written in exile in Paris in 1940, Benjamin refines the idea of historical materialism. He presents historical materialism as the philosophical counterpart to the chess-playing puppet operated by a concealed dwarf, who always beats his unwitting opponent. In Benjamin’s analogy the concealed dwarf of historical materialism is theology.9 For Benjamin, theology, even if it is scarcely acknowledged as such, inevitably plays a part in structuring our ethically responsible approaches to the past. Similarly, in considering how literary approaches to representing the Holocaust attend to the ethical obligations for remembering the dead, I have noticed a connection between literary texts of particular genres written in response to the Holocaust and various Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance which demand the ritualized participation of worshippers. In the literary texts I will examine, secular remembrance, including of the Holocaust, is always also a reinterpretation of religious remembrance. The ritual context of memorial Vergegenwärtigung in the Hebrew Bible, involving remembrance which is simultaneously valued for its own sake and for its potential to rouse its participants to forms of action, is particularly relevant here, not least for its verbal correspondence with the ideas about active remembrance formulated by Adorno and Benjamin. As part of the literary texts’ response to the Holocaust, what they regard as the no longer tenable address of man to God involved in religious forms of remembrance is redirected towards human addressees and becomes a way of communicating the inevitable inadequacy of language to attend to the unimaginable sufferings of the victims. The literary enactment of the failure of theological address may or may not thereby get beyond that failure, via the residual possibilities for an intertextual, intersubjective relation that the address entails because of its structural similarity with the redundant address of the Judaeo-Christian form of remembrance. The significance of the structural similarities between the modes of address involved in the theological and literary forms of remembrance – between poetry and confession, novelistic prose and anamnesis, and drama and testament – lies in their corresponding possibilities for intersubjective ethical reorientation. Whereas religious remembrance potentially leads worshippers towards more responsible interactions with others, in their reconfiguration of these theologically-founded forms of

18

Forgetting to Remember

remembrance, literary texts generate the intertextual possibility for a reorientation of the remembering subject towards the text’s addressee(s). An ethical reorientation which is limited to the literary text might seem a rather too modest as well as abstract contribution to the urgent need for socio-economic change after the Holocaust articulated by Adorno and by some of the texts’ authors themselves. The post-Holocaust philosophy of an ethics of infinite intersubjective responsibility developed by Emmanuel Levinas suggests how relationships between individuals form the basis for meaningful legal and political institutions, however, as well as how such interpersonal relationships might be modelled on literary structures of address. In the next section of this chapter, ‘Religion, Remembrance and Ritual’, I will consider the role of remembrance in the formation of religious practices and examine religious concepts of remembrance in general. This establishes the context for my discussion, in subsequent chapters, of the relationship between particular forms of remembrance and particular literary forms. In his definitive study of the Jewish Liturgy, Ismar Elbogen observes that, ‘The Bible is rather rich in words for prayer and to pray, but in the literature dealing with liturgical matters, not one of these is used in quite the same way as in the Bible, nearly all having acquired different meanings in the course of time.’10 A similar claim can be made for ‘remembrance’ and ‘to remember’. In the following section, ‘Memory in the Hebrew Bible’, I consider the centrality of remembrance in the religion of the Hebrew Bible, exploring how remembrance and religion are etymologically and functionally interconnected within two central motifs of covenant and sacrifice. In my examination of the various usages of the Hebrew verb for remembering, zkr, I set out how these might be identified with the theological concept of Vergegenwärtigung or actualization, in which ritualized remembrance is celebrated both as a valuable undertaking for its own sake and for its potential as a call to action for its participants. Throughout this presentation I show how the concepts of remembrance in the Hebrew Bible are relevant to my understanding of the connections between the structures of address involved in religious remembering and those entailed by the literary remembrance of the Holocaust. In the next section, ‘The Evolution of Christian Forms of Remembrance’, I briefly describe how Christian worship at first developed alongside Jewish practice and then defined itself in opposition to Judaism. The literary texts repeatedly call for a revision of Christian memorial tradition in order to take account of both the history of Christian anti-Semitism and the dimension of Christian

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responsibility for Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. The consideration of remembrance as Judaeo-Christian Vergegenwärtigung in this chapter provides the foundation for my examination of remembrance of the Holocaust as a reconfiguration of religious forms of remembrance in the literary texts in the remainder of the book. Religion, Remembrance and Ritual Religion is etymologically connected to remembrance. In his study of the origins of institutional language, Emile Benveniste gives an account of the ‘only two terms, one from Greek and the other from Latin, which can pass for equivalents of our word “religion”’.11 Each term is derived from a word meaning ‘recollection’ in its respective language. The first is the Greek word thrēskeίa which refers to ideas connected with cult and piety: ‘The substantive thrēskeίa derives, curiously enough, from a present tense in –skō which we have in the form of a gloss in Hesychius: thrếskó : noố and also thráskein : anamimnếskein “cause to recollect”’.12 The origins of the second term, the Latin religio, have been the subject of intense debate in linguistic scholarship. Two opposing schools of thought have connected religio with legere meaning ‘gather, collect, recognize’ or with ligare meaning ‘to bind’. Benveniste argues strongly for the former derivation on semantic and morphological grounds, concluding ‘the word must be attached to relegere “to collect again, to take up again for a new choice, to return to a previous synthesis in order to recompose it”: thus religio “religious scruple” was originally a subjective attitude, an act of reflexion bound up with some fear of a religious kind’.13 Jacques Derrida refers to Benveniste’s account in his essay ‘Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’, arguing that regardless of which etymological standpoint one accepts concerning the origin of religio, the idea of ‘recollection’ still prevails, since ‘re-binding’ something, from religare, is also a form of recollection.14 In a response to Derrida’s essay, Hans-Georg Gadamer maintains that he is unconvinced about the contribution that etymological data makes to our understanding of a word’s meaning. Gadamer’s essay nevertheless reinforces the connection between remembrance and religion demonstrated in the etymological research. He stresses the forward-thinking aspect of human self-consciousness and particularly awareness of death as the counterpart to ‘new horizons of memory and remembrance’ within religious thought. The human sense of futurity is part of a temporal awareness which

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Forgetting to Remember

necessarily involves recollection, as evidenced in the example Gadamer gives of burial customs in which the dead are honoured and remembered through the provision that is made for their afterlife.15 The etymological link between religion and memory is supported by their functional relationship. Religions commonly consist of a set of ideas supported by faith; they depend upon the memories of their practitioners for the continued existence of both ideas and faith. The ways in which ideas and faith are articulated and remembered shape the religious community, which is organized around communal rituals designed to perpetuate the shared ideas and beliefs, and to preserve the distinctions between the sacred and the profane contained therein. While the faculty of memory is critical to the ways in which religious beliefs and practices are sustained, there are also suggestions that it may be connected with the origins of such beliefs and practices. Friedrich Schleiermacher posits a fundamental connection between memory and religion in his treatise Über die Religion (On Religion), in which he uses the Platonic concept of knowledge as recollection expounded in the Meno to explain religious awareness.16 Plato’s theory is considered in more detail as part of the discussion of anamnesis in Chapter Three. The human capacity for memory and the religious impulse may be discussed in conjunction with one another as characteristics which distinguish man from other animals. Edmond de Pressensé argues that man’s capacity for memory and his religious instincts belong together. It is through his ability to comprehend his own past and future and thus to remember and reflect upon his own experience, de Pressensé suggests, that man is drawn to look beyond that experience and to seek some other-worldly or religious inspiration.17 The faculty of memory stimulates man to formulate religious ideas which are in turn sustained by that same capacity for remembrance. Memory is also inseparable from religious practice for Maurice Halbwachs, who describes how every religion, in addition to developing a body of sacred remembrances, tends to incorporate a symbolic account of the secular historical events which moulded the origins of the society in which it is practiced.18 Halbwachs discusses the operation of memory within religious communities in order to illustrate his thesis of collective memory. His fundamental premise is that ‘No memory is possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections’.19 Individual memory is only meaningful in the context of the social circumstances in which it is generated. In common with neuro-scientific studies of

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memory function, where an understanding of the way memory works is frequently approached through the examination of instances of amnesia or other impairments, Halbwachs illustrates his point with the observation that, although amnesiac patients frequently forget the details of their social experiences, they rarely forget that they are members of a social group per se. The religious community is one such social group, and one which, as it generally conceives of itself in collective terms, is particularly suited to observations about collective memory. Religion is clearly not the only context in which forms of collective remembrance are instituted, but it remains one of the most influential. Halbwachs identifies the defining characteristic of religious collective memory in its fixity, albeit within the context of a discussion about the evolution of religious ideas.20 He claims that while other social groups tend to exchange and share their memories with one another, religious communities develop and then identify themselves with a set of memories which are then maintained and defended. These memories become fixed through their incorporation into and repeated enactment in religious ritual. Since Halbwachs’s influential account there have been numerous attempts further to elaborate the relationship between religion, remembrance and ritual. Another French sociologist, Danièle HervieuLéger, draws on Halbwachs’s thesis of collective memory in religious life as well as the thought of Emile Durkheim on religion and society which was also influential for Halbwachs’s thinking. In her analysis of the role of religion in contemporary life, Religion as a Chain of Memory, Hervieu-Léger identifies three elements which should be part of a definition of religion: ‘the expression of believing, the memory of continuity, and the legitimizing reference to an authorized version of such memory, that is to say to a tradition’.21 She writes about the sociological tendency to associate religion predominantly with memorial tradition so that religion ‘is thereby effectively consigned to a function of nostalgic or exotic remembrance’.22 The ritualized remembrance at the heart of religious practice is at the centre of Paul Connerton’s study, How Societies Remember. Connerton relies upon and seeks to extend Halbwachs’s work in his account of how remembered knowledge about the past is communicated and sustained through ritual performances. These ‘commemorative ceremonies’ are central to the ways in which what he – after Halbwachs – calls ‘social memory’ is proclaimed and passed on as such. Connerton goes further in insisting that such ceremonies are always performative, based around habitual actions, and therefore also

22

Forgetting to Remember

bodily. They are never only word- or text-based, but primarily bodily enactments of the word or text.23 Like Halbwachs, Connerton refers to the development of Old Testament religious practices out of which Christianity was to evolve to illustrate his thesis. He focuses on the ‘theology of memory’ in Deuteronomy, according to which, ‘Israel observes festivals in order to remember. What is remembered is the historical narrative of a community.’24 The author proposes a reassessment of rituals focusing on their form rather than on their content and on the way in which they constitute a re-enactment of significant events for their participants. Following Halbwachs’s observation of the essential fixity of the content of religious memory, Connerton describes the fixed formal characteristics of the ritual utterances in which that memory finds expression, consisting in ‘a restricted vocabulary, the exclusion of some syntactic forms, a fixity in the sequence of speech acts, fixed patterns in the volume of utterances, and a limited flexibility of intonation’.25 For ritual utterances to be effective in propagating and maintaining religious memory, they must be repeated unchanged. Connerton illustrates what is at stake by describing how the repetition of artistic performances is different from the repetition of religious rites: ‘Verbal re-enactment here is a special kind of actualisation, and it is in its sacramental aspect that liturgical language has its most evidently actualising quality … [E]verything turns upon the fact that the liturgy is not propositional statement but sacred action. These actions convey conviction by incorporating it.’26 Connerton seeks to define ritual behaviour by emphasizing how it differs from art, particularly art as theatrical performance, yet his account of ritual language anticipates some aspects of my argument about the most meaningful ways in which the Holocaust is remembered in literature. Although he is concerned to emphasize a process apart from textual inscription, his view of collective memory as performance according to a sacramental understanding of ritual will inform my interpretation of the performative mode of address in some literary remembrance of the Holocaust. Gilbert Lewis’s anthropological study of the rituals of the Gnau people of New Guinea, Day of Shining Red, has a very useful chapter which discusses rituals in general. Like Connerton, Lewis compares problems of defining ritual to problems of aesthetics, but Lewis points to similarities in our attitudes to both forms and likens the performance of ritual to that of a play. Lewis establishes a range of characteristics which distinguish ritual from other types of behaviour

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including the explicit nature of ritual content, the regulation of ritual participation and the public aspect of ritual performance. Lewis explains his sense of the interconnectedness of religion, remembrance and ritual when he describes how rituals are often seen not as human creations, but ‘as an ancestral or divine invention for the ordering of human conduct in certain social affairs’.27 Albert H. Friedlander extends the discussion of ritual practice into the area of Holocaust remembrance and privileges the literary context. Although he shares some of Halbwachs’s fundamental premises about the interconnectedness of religious memory and ritual, he offers an opposing account of the nature of that connection. Friedlander describes the preservation of religious collective memory as a continual negotiation between past and present, rather than as a dogged adherence to the past.28 While Halbwachs portrays ritual as a sterile form of worship which, even as it reinforces religious meaning through repetition, also tends to diminish it, Friedlander argues that participation in religious ritual brings about self-renewal.29 Friedlander’s claim that religious rituals of remembrance can bring about a transformation in worshippers’ present-day conduct entails a dynamic relationship between past and present similar to that sought by Walter Benjamin in his thesis of historical materialism. Benjamin stresses that the aim of the historical materialist is not to understand history ‘how it actually was’, in line with the dominant theory of history-writing formulated by the nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke, but always to maintain a perspective which takes account of current conditions.30 Recognizing the interdependence of remembrance and ritual within the Jewish tradition, Friedlander describes, in relation to the memory of the Holocaust, the capacity of – not only religious – ritual to transform the superficial act of Erinnern (‘remembering’) into a more profound Gedenken (‘remembrance’). In questioning the adequacy of proposals for the Berlin Holocaust memorial, Friedlander asks, ‘But does that lead to remembering, to remembrance, to contrition and change?’31 Friedlander’s elaboration of what is required of the visitor to the Holocaust memorial beyond straightforward ‘remembering’ is insightful. The three additional words he uses, ‘remembrance’, ‘contrition’ and ‘change’ reflect a progressively more thoughtful memorial encounter, in which the visitor is engaged with the ethical obligations of remembrance. Friedlander asks for a ritualized remembrance where an active remembrance results in repentance and is followed by a corresponding transformation in thought and

24

Forgetting to Remember

behaviour towards others. This requirement for remembrance leading to altered behaviour is comparable with one of the dominant views of the psychological conception of remembrance in the Hebrew Bible which I will examine in the following section, as well as the demands made of the penitent in Christian sacramental confession. Ritual remembrance, properly understood, requires active participation from those involved, although Friedlander notes that the very requirement placed upon the faithful to be actively engaged during rituals of religious remembrance in order for them to be meaningful can become a mask for forgetfulness among worshippers, masquerading as remembrance.32 Friedlander, in common with the Jewish theologian Irving Greenberg, looks to literature and particularly poetry to synthesize a form of remembrance of the Holocaust – a new liturgy – which will engage Jews, Christians and secular participants alike in a shared ritual practice. These kinds of ideas about the enduring connections between the ways in which people remember and ritualized forms of religious remembrance are challenged by some commentators on JudaeoChristian memory and history. In an essay on the relationship between Christianity and ritual, published in 1880, the Reverend W. Warren argues that although ‘the Christian faith has no necessary connexion with any vestment, gesture or posture, nor are these the necessary expression of it’, Christian principles are nonetheless bound up with ritual expression, since the ideal Christian life implies a form of ritual participation.33 Similarly, C. Ryder Smith maintains that, ‘There is probably no religious idea that cannot be expressed by ritual, but no particular ritual expression is essential to any religious idea’.34 While Warren and Smith are almost certainly right in that no ritual is identical with a particular religious idea, there are undeniably enduring affiliations between particular types of religious idea and particular ritual practices, such as the ancient connection between expiation and sacrifice. Smith overlooks the importance of ritual in the dissemination of religious ideas among worshippers, and ignores the concept of a sacramental ritual experience instituted by God in which believers participate in certain ideas. A more recent commentator, Michael A. Signer, develops Smith’s position when he writes that, ‘Modernity has shattered a naïve conjunction between memory and ritualization’.35 Signer contrasts the modern historical approach to the development of religious ideas with the more traditional theological one which privileges memory. Such distinctions do not preclude the possibility of a more self-aware connection between remembrance and ritual being

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made in this context, however. As in the literary examples I will discuss in subsequent chapters, the most attentive religious practitioners depend upon ritual forms of remembrance, even while they call those same forms into question. Others who write about the relationship between memory and history in the Jewish context draw upon the vivid connection between memory and ritual in order to illuminate the Jewish approach to historiography. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi explores the seeming paradox in the Jewish preoccupation with memory and history and simultaneous scarcity of Jewish historiography.36 He asks whether the Biblical injunction to remember need necessarily be fulfilled through the writing of history, and concludes that in fact this command has little connection with historical curiosity. Yerushalmi recognizes that the principal means by which remembrance is transmitted in the Hebrew Bible is ritual and that its chief exponents are priests and prophets, rather than historians. He describes how up until the modern era it was impossible to distinguish between Jewish collective memory and historiography; since the Bible was believed to contain the whole pattern not only of past but also of future history there was little incentive for Jewish writers to chronicle historical events outside of this context. As proof of his thesis, Yerushalmi points to the situation of those contemporary Jews for whom historiography is irrelevant: ‘still within the enchanted circle of tradition … they seek, not the historicity of the past, but its eternal contemporaneity’.37 Finally, Yerushalmi laments the separation of history from literature, which, he thinks, might have bridged the divide between history and the ritual pull of collective memory in the modern era. He concludes in terms which prefigure those of Albert Friedlander, that ‘Those who are alienated from the past cannot be drawn to it by explanation alone; they require evocation as well’.38 ‘Evocation’ is another way of describing the process of Vergegenwärtigung or actualization entailed by religious remembrance and reinterpreted in the literary remembrance of the Holocaust. Amos Funkenstein opposes the rigidity of Yerushalmi’s distinction between historiography and collective memory, although without seriously disputing that author’s thesis. According to Funkenstein, the principal difference between the historical approach to the past and the approach taken by collective memory is in their attitudes to the present. While modern historiography is interested in the past for its own sake and seeks to reveal the truth about the past in a way which avoids anachronisms, collective memory is always selective, since it

26

Forgetting to Remember

seeks to create a ‘usable’ account of the past which helps to explain the present.39 Although it has long been recognized that, ‘in the Old Testament there is little history for history’s sake’,40 Funkenstein stresses that there has always been a Jewish historical consciousness which has existed regardless of the state of Biblical or other historiography, and has helped to ensure that ‘Jewish culture never took itself for granted’.41 He argues that historical consciousness and historiography do not need to be seen as completely opposing ideas about collective memory, but that they are simply more organized and better developed forms of remembrance. Funkenstein goes on to identify remnants of ritualized remembrance in the conduct of the modern nation state, claiming that sacred forms of liturgical remembrance have been transformed into the state’s memorials, commemoration ceremonies and days of national remembrance.42 This aspect of Funkenstein’s account complements my thesis regarding the reinterpretation of religious forms of remembrance in secular literary responses to the Holocaust, although my analysis focuses on the structural similarities between the modes of address of the respective forms of remembrance and the ethical significance of this shared address. Memory in the Hebrew Bible It is a commonplace that memory plays a particularly central role within the Jewish religion.43 Jewish religious identity and worship are based around the remembrance and re-telling of the saving acts of God in leading the Israelites out of their bondage in Egypt and toward the Promised Land. In the Biblical context, religious forms of remembrance structure ethical relationships between humankind and God, and thence also between individuals. After the Holocaust, for the authors whose texts I will consider in subsequent chapters, the remembrance of what happened defines the possibilities of continued linguistic and literary expression, and thus remembrance continues to bear upon relationships between people, to the extent that these take place in acts of linguistic address, in ways which can be traced back to religious forms of remembrance. The theological basis for the secular remembrance of the Holocaust therefore matters because it continues to register in linguistic structures, often in terms of absence, and so continues to influence the human sense of relatedness to other people and (dis)orientation in the world. In what follows I will examine the memorial contexts in which the various terms for remembrance are

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invoked in the Hebrew Bible in order to demonstrate some of the connections between them and the ideas about remembrance which I will be exploring in literary contexts in the later chapters. The verb zākhar from the root zkr or ‘remember’ has a wide range of meanings as it is used in the Hebrew Bible. Friedlander describes how, ‘The word sachor runs through the whole Bible like a red thread’.44 The occurrences are spread across twenty-eight books of the Bible, with the most concentrated usage being in the Psalter.45 Related usages include the nouns zēkher or ‘memory’, and zikkārôn or ‘memorial’, as well as the cultic term ’azkārāh or ‘fire offering’.46 The root form of zākhar can mean ‘remember’, ‘recall’ or ‘call to mind’ when the object of remembrance is in the past, as with the many Biblical imprecations to remember the exodus from Egypt (e.g. Deut. 5: 15). If the context is oriented towards the present or the future it can mean rather ‘consider’ or ‘keep in mind’, as with the injunction to remember God, since his will affects one’s present circumstances (Deut. 8: 18). Although zākhar is used in the Bible in what Brevard S. Childs refers to as ‘its basic psychological sense’ of recalling a past event or other experience, it is primarily employed in the context of religious remembrance.47 The different connotations involved in Biblical acts of remembering encompass a range of the possible memorial experiences in relation to the remembrance of the Holocaust, including those described above by Friedlander. The various interpretations of the use of zākhar in the Hebrew Bible, particularly those which view it in terms of a process of (Benjaminesque) actualization, help to illuminate my understanding of the operation of the literary remembrance of the Holocaust in terms of particular Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance which I discuss in subsequent chapters. The first significant study of the zkr root in the Hebrew Bible was produced by Johannes Pedersen in his book, Israel: Its Life and Culture. Pedersen suggests that the understanding of memory in ancient Israel was fundamentally different to our own, so that any reference to ‘remembering’ always also implied a consequent action. There are certainly many instances in the Hebrew Bible where the injunction to ‘remember’ means ‘remember and do something’. The verb zākhar frequently occurs in conjunction with other verbs denoting activity, as on occasions when remembering the commandments is immediately linked to doing them (Nu. 15: 40; Ps. 103: 18).48 Pedersen concluded that such remembering or thinking and the subsequent action were indistinguishable from one another in the Hebrew understanding.

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Forgetting to Remember

Further support for this conception is drawn from the Biblical usage of the verb most commonly appearing as an antonym to zkr, namely škh or ‘forget’. Where this verb occurs it does not mean that one is no longer able to recall a particular thought, but refers to an action which indicates that its performer is no longer keeping God in mind, such as worshipping other gods (Deut. 8: 19) or not keeping the commandments (Deut. 8: 11).49 While recognizing the relevance of Pedersen’s arguments, Childs takes issue with his conclusions, since although there is a definite relation between thinking or remembering and acting, he maintains that ‘there is no real evidence which demands a semantic identification’.50 Childs proposes that the verb zkr simply has a wider range of possible meanings than its equivalent in English. Nonetheless, Pedersen’s account remains influential for the prevailing understanding of memory as entailing action towards another, in the Hebrew Bible and sometimes also the New Testament, including that of Childs, and is significant for my understanding of the literary remembrance of the Holocaust in terms of a performative address oriented towards another or others. Abraham J. Heschel discusses the pre-eminence of action in the Jewish way of life in the contemporary context. In an essay setting out his sense of the dimensions of the necessary Christian confrontation with Judaism after the Holocaust he writes that: Of all the forms of living, doing is the most patent way of aiding. Action is truth. The deed is elucidation of existence, expressing thirst for God with body and soul. The Jewish mitzvah is a prayer in the form of a deed. The mitzvot are the Jewish sacraments, sacraments that may be performed in common deeds of kindness. Their nature is intelligible if seen in the light of God’s care for man.51 Hebrew etymology aside, Heschel makes the case for doing as an ethically essential counterpart to all intellectual activity, including remembering. Heschel’s statement equates ethically responsible conduct towards others with sacramental worship, a connection which is fundamental in the New Testament and which bears upon my thesis about the potential for intersubjective reorientation generated by the literary remembrance of the Holocaust. In subsequent chapters I show how the different authors’ senses of why and how they write concur with the understanding of Holocaust remembrance as an ethical duty, as well as how the structures of remembrance in their texts – with

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their basis in the theological forms of remembrance discussed in this chapter – fulfil the demands of Adorno and others for active remembrance of the Holocaust. The most significant aspect of the connection between the literary ways of remembering the Holocaust and Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance is the corresponding ‘action’ of the remembering subject, manifested in the structure of the textual address as a reorientation of the ‘I’ in relation to the ‘you’. The action takes place at the level of the texts themselves, in their self-reflexive challenges to language, literary form and the theologically-motivated forms of remembrance which they both rely upon and subvert. The key distinction to be made in the Biblical use of zākhar relates to the identity of the remembering subject: whether it is man or God who is remembering. Fundamental challenges to both versions of remembrance are important for the ways in which the literary texts I examine establish the precarious linguistic possibilities of address within which remembrance of the Holocaust can occur. Childs observes that when God remembers, ‘The emphasis falls on remembrance as an action directed toward someone rather than on the psychological experience of the subject’.52 Childs notes that although God’s memory is not precisely the same as the ensuing action, neither can the two be separated. So God’s remembering nearly always implies a concomitant action towards the – human – object of remembrance. When God remembers Rachel (Gen. 30: 22) and Hannah (I Sam. 1: 11, 19) they bear children, and God’s remembrance of Samson restores his strength (Jgs. 16: 28).53 For Childs, however, God’s remembering is not about causing new things to happen, rather, ‘The essence of God’s remembering lies in his acting toward someone because of a previous commitment’.54 This idea is exemplified in the ways in which God remembers and observes the covenants which He makes with man, which are explored in more detail below. The orientation towards human objects of remembrance involved in acts of divine remembering in the Hebrew Bible is contested and distorted in the versions of theological relationships posited in many of the literary texts I discuss later. God’s remembering is not always favourable, since He may remember man’s transgressions in order to punish them, as in Jer. 14: 10.55 Whatever the status of God’s actions towards those people He remembers, however, to be forgotten by God is to remain untouched by His actions, which amounts to being denied existence. The psalmist in Psalm 88 appeals to a God who no longer remembers him, as he

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lies in a state of living death, cut off from God and cast by Him, ‘in the lowest pit, in darkness in the deeps’ (Ps. 88: 6). God’s forgetting need not always have negative consequences for man, however, since by forgetting man’s sin God gives absolution: ‘for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more’ (Jer. 31: 34; see also Isa. 43: 25). God’s remembrance and his forgetting alike have ontological consequences for mankind.56 This conception of divine remembrance relates to post-Holocaust Jewish theology – aspects of which are explored in a number of the texts I examine in subsequent chapters – in which Auschwitz, as a metonym for suffering during the Holocaust, becomes the most extreme historical example of God having forgotten the Jewish people. Deuteronomy consists of a compilation of laws assembled at different times and by different authors and has the highest incidence of the root form of zākhar.57 Childs describes how the Deuteronomist had a particular challenge to relate the religious tradition of Israel, as it was created by Moses, to a new generation of Israelites who did not experience the events for themselves. The crucial role now played by memory in communicating the significant events of the past explains its theological importance in Deuteronomy.58 Childs develops this idea of the historical context for the reliance upon memory in Deuteronomy – and the Deuteronomist texts ‘Deutero-Isaiah’, Ezekiel, and the complaint psalms – into a thesis about the subsequent operation of memory in Judaism as a whole. He maintains that the reinterpretation of the experiences and identity of the Israelite community that was required at this point helped to foster a form of remembrance which extended the basic psychological understanding of zkr and gave it a new theological meaning.59 Following other scholars, Childs proposes a theory of memory as actualization which describes the participation in the redemptive time of the remembered event on the part of the believer, and is comparable to the account of ritualized, sacramental remembrance advanced by Connerton. As a form of remembrance undertaken for its own sake, in which past events are re-lived in the present, it has gained currency among a number of commentators in relation to the meaning of zkr in particular sections of the Hebrew Bible. The combined conception of zkr as a morally valuable undertaking for its own sake and as entailing actualization is central to the reinterpretation of the Judaeo-Christian ritual context of remembrance in the literary remembrance of the Holocaust. While the collective memory and the ritual observances by which it is perpetuated do fulfil other functions within the Biblical

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community of Israel, these remain secondary to the idea of remembrance for its own sake. Remembering for the sake of remembering is a fundamental part of the definition of Vergegenwärtigung advanced by Hans Zirker in his study of the memorial focus of the psalms. Zirker follows Pedersen’s thesis of the Hebrew zkr entailing action; for him the ‘actualizing’ memory is the ‘narrative’ memory of the psalms, where historical events are recalled rather than just described.60 Zirker identifies two ways Israel had of relating to the past: chronologically and ritually. Both of these find expression in the practice of Vergegenwärtigung: In the first instance Vergegenwärtigung refers to the ordinary sense of remembering past events, the attempt to ensure that past danger is not forgotten by retelling it. In this sense ritual and history-writing are in agreement with one another in that they both keep knowledge of the past alive. At the same time, a closer inspection of the psalms gives us reason to assume a more lively relationship to past events by means of the ritual context than that expressed solely by the intellectual act of remembering; the celebration of the liturgy is seen as an event in which the community of worshippers become eyewitnesses to their own history, which then unfolds all over again in the words.61 This dual sense of zkr as Vergegenwärtigung in the Hebrew Bible, both as a historical narrative which describes past events and as a form of remembrance which makes those events count again in the present for those participating in ritual worship echoes Benjamin’s proposal for understanding history both as a written record and as remembrance discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Both Zirker’s first sense of zkr as Vergegenwärtigung as remembering for its own sake, and the second actualizing sense in which the remembering subjects become eyewitnesses to history, connect with the ways in which remembrance of the Holocaust is formulated in the literary texts I will consider in subsequent chapters. In Chapter Three I discuss the memorial response to the Holocaust entailed by the narratorial address in Günter Grass and Imre Kertész’s novelistic prose in terms of the ritual context of Eucharistic anamnesis, which relies on both these meanings of remembrance as Vergegenwärtigung, in addition to its communal performative context. In Chapter Four I compare the dramatic address in play-texts responding to the Holocaust by Peter Weiss and Samuel Beckett with the address of the ‘living voice’ involved in proclaiming

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the Biblical mode of testamentary remembrance in Zirker’s account of the ritual context of Vergegenwärtigung. Covenantal Remembrance The brit or ‘covenant’ formed the basis for stable community relations in ancient Israelite society, in which the covenants between God and the people were the primary source of collective identity and law.62 Covenants place a contractual obligation to remember upon both parties: if the people remember God and his covenant with them, then God will remember his people. Childs describes how ‘Memory plays a central role in making Israel constantly aware of the nature of God’s benevolent acts as well as of her own covenantal pledge’.63 Although the Hebrew Bible frequently has a covenant or the making of one as the object of divine remembrance (Ex. 2: 24, 6: 5), including instances when man beseeches God to remember His covenant (Ex. 32: 13; Jer. 14: 21), nowhere do we find man remembering the particular covenants with God. Man is in danger of forgetting the covenant (Deut. 4: 23) and thus of forsaking (Jer. 22: 9; Deut. 29: 25), breaking (Deut. 31: 16, 20), or transgressing against it (Josh. 7: 11, 15; 23: 16; Deut. 17: 2; Jgs. 2: 20; II K. 18: 12; Hos. 6: 7; 8: 1). Man remembers rather the actions of God towards mankind which took place under the auspices of the covenantal relationships. Thus, the human duty of covenantal remembrance is fulfilled in each act of worshipping or remembering God. The precise nature of this duty changes as the Biblical conception of the covenantal relationship between man and God evolves. The covenant remains one of the central concerns of Jewish theology after the Holocaust, which endeavours to assess the implications of what happened during the Holocaust for the possibility of an ongoing covenantal relationship. Some new versions of the covenant relationship are based on God’s perceived abrogation of his covenantal responsibilities in the Holocaust. Irving Greenberg’s proposal of a ‘voluntary covenant’64 and Steven L. Jacobs’ ‘covenants of dialogue’65 both emphasize intersubjective human relationships as the primary focus of covenantal understanding after the Holocaust. Despite their radical divergence from the exemplary theological covenantal relation, Greenberg and Jacobs nevertheless present their ideas within a continuum of thinking about covenantal remembrance which begins with the Hebrew Bible. They ask how, in view of God’s failure to remember His people in Auschwitz, Jews should henceforth remember God. These questions

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regarding the possibility for ongoing Jewish theological relationships recur in texts I consider later by Paul Celan and Imre Kertész within their exploration and exploitation of ritual contexts of Jewish worship, including the psalm and the Kaddish prayer. In these literary texts, the untenability of the traditional sense of the covenant between God and the Jewish people is figured in terms of the diminished possibilities for man’s addressing and remembering God within language. The difficulties of addressing God are thereby connected with the limitations of language in general after the Holocaust, and particularly the challenges of instantiating an intersubjective address in their texts within which it will be possible to remember what happened in the Holocaust. The widely perceived sense of the failure of theological address after the Holocaust, epitomized by the collapse of the covenantal relationship, presents a literary possibility – via the reconfiguration of the desanctified structures of theological address – for communicating the failure of language to enable meaningful exchange during and after what happened. The various conceptions of covenantal relationships in the Bible evolve from the promise God makes to Noah and all creation never again to flood the earth (Gen. 9: 9 ff.). When the flood waters have subsided, God attaches two conditions to His command to ‘be fruitful and multiply’, which are that man must not eat the blood of living animals, or shed human blood (Gen. 9: 3–6). Man’s obedience to these laws does not appear to affect God’s observation of the covenant, however, since it is to be ‘everlasting’. This covenant is not a mutual undertaking in the traditional sense, but rather God’s assurance that He will never again seek to destroy creation in a flood.66 The rainbow becomes the sign of the covenant, prompting God to remember His promise (Gen. 9: 15–16), and necessarily also serving to remind man of God.67 The subsequent covenant between God and Abraham entails a commitment not only from God, and not merely the requirement for man to refrain from certain behaviour, but active participation from Abraham and his descendants. God will make Abraham the father of many nations and bestow upon them the land of Canaan, but only if Abraham maintains the token of the covenant, by being circumcised and ensuring the circumcision of every male child (Gen. 17). The rite of circumcision is made a permanent condition of God’s covenant between Abraham and his issue. In the Abrahamic covenant the remembrance required of both God and man is more active than the covenant with Noah; both God and man must remember to do something, rather than to avoid doing something.

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Jeremiah envisages a time when outward signs of the remembrance of God will be superfluous for the fulfilment of that relationship. In such a time, ‘they shall say no more, the ark of the covenant of the Lord: neither shall it come to mind: neither shall they remember it’ (3: 16). Jeremiah imagines a new covenant between God and man which will replace those formerly made with the patriarchs. The covenant will be between God and the house of Israel, and, rather than being signified by an external token of remembrance, like the previous covenant, it is described as being written on the hearts of the people (Jer. 31: 33). In such a covenant there will be no need for signs like the rainbow or rituals such as circumcision, for each individual person will live in the knowledge of God. God’s part in such a covenant – His loving gesture of remembrance – will actually take the form of forgetfulness, as He chooses to ‘forgive [men’s] iniquity, and … remember their sin no more’ (Jer. 31: 34). The form of remembrance of God will be the individual’s way of life. As such, Jeremiah seeks a shift in the terms of the covenantal relationship towards greater individual responsibility for upholding and sustaining the memory of God. He advocates a turn from ritual remembrance, towards a personal memory of God which keeps Him in mind in the midst of daily life rather than attending to the duty to remember God only during ritual observances. Christians understand the new covenantal relationship envisaged by Jeremiah to be fulfilled in the New Testament.68 Jeremiah’s vision of the future covenantal relationship is relevant to the emphasis on individual responsibility in many interpretations of the covenant in post-Holocaust Jewish theology. Greenberg, for example, describes circumcision as ‘The great symbol of the involuntary covenant’ by virtue of its ‘powerful symbolic statement that all Jews are bound by birth and stand for the covenant whether or not they are in the mood to witness’.69 Greenberg’s notion of the ‘voluntary covenant’ is an extreme development of Jeremiah’s understanding of the future covenant which not only obviates the requirement for outward demonstrations of remembrance of God, but even potentially bypasses the need for a theological relation at all.70 The covenant between God and Moses at Mount Sinai in Exodus 34 deepens and extends the obligations of remembrance between God and the people which were established in the earlier covenants and is discussed as an example of memorial Vergegenwärtigung. It institutes a large number of laws concerning daily life and practices of worship which the Israelites must keep in order to correctly observe the

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commandment of remembrance of God. The story of the establishment of the covenant between God and Moses is retold in Deuteronomy 5: 3. Moses addresses the community of Israel, saying, ‘The Lord made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day.’ Martin Noth suggests that the Deuteronomist inserted this statement to refer not primarily to the Israelites of his own generation, but to encompass all the subsequent generations of Israel who would stand to receive God’s law. He argues that the frequent use of the word ‘today’ in Deuteronomy is used in this sense of asserting the continually renewed Vergegenwärtigung – the ‘visualization’ or ‘recollection’ – of Israel’s historical experiences of God.71 For Noth, the Deuteronomist’s account of the covenant at Sinai is an exemplary instance of the process of Vergegenwärtigung which he maintains is central to an understanding of Biblical theology. Man’s remembrance of the covenant is always an actualizing remembrance since it has as its object an action of God which is always relevant in an ongoing sense to the lived experiences of contemporary Israelites. Consequently, as Heschel writes, ‘Israel is a people in whom the past endures in the present tense. The exodus occurs now.’72 Covenantal remembrance, then, involves not only the recollection of the historical circumstances in which the covenant was formed, but also the understanding of the present and future conditions in which the covenant applies; it is an attempt to gain insight into the ongoing relevance of God’s actions through the proclamation or retelling of those actions. As Walther Eichrodt observes, the covenant relationship ‘provides life with a goal and history with a meaning’.73 Hans Zirker describes precisely this narrative perspective, formed in perpetual relation to the covenant, in the psalms: ‘Rather than merely being recounted, the memory itself is presented in terms of its significance for the convental relationship.’74 Zirker’s characterization of Vergegenwärtigung concurs with that of Noth, whereby, ‘Each instance of Vergegenwärtigung testifies that God and his actions are always present, but given that people are unavoidably conditioned by time, they are unable to grasp this presence without God’s actions being repeatedly “actualized” in their acts of worship.’75 Noth’s and Zirker’s interpretation of the centrality of Vergegenwärtigung in relation to the covenant with Moses in both a scriptural and a liturgical context suggests further parallels between the understanding of covenantal remembrance in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian understanding of the new covenant of the Eucharist. So the covenantal relationships between man and God in the Hebrew Bible, whether

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actually in place, as in those with Noah, Abraham and Moses, or envisaged for the future, as that of Jeremiah, while all addressing the question of the best way to institute the requirements for mutual remembrance between man and God, do so in quite different ways, including ways which prefigure important forms of Christian remembrance. The actualizing function of covenantal remembrance, emphasizing the present significance of past events, is relevant to the ways in which the Holocaust is remembered in the literary texts I discuss in subsequent chapters. In the methodological statements made by some of the writers I discuss (Celan, Kertész, Grass and Weiss), and in the literary practice of all six authors, part of the aim of writing in response to the Holocaust is to attest to their sense that the Holocaust is not over – that it persists in linguistic relations. Benjamin’s sense of redemptive remembrance is unavailable for those who suffered during the Holocaust because of language’s inevitable failure adequately to recount what happened. The literary texts enact this failure of remembrance but in doing so affirm the residual possibility of an intersubjective intertextual address, which is itself the means of demonstrating the necessary recognition of the failure to contract meaningful theological and linguistic relations after the Holocaust. In theological and literary responses to the Holocaust there is a widespread rejection of the terms of covenantal remembrance in the Hebrew Bible, and yet versions of the covenant relationship persist in post-Holocaust theology, and in literary texts the structures of address involved in the ritual contexts for the articulation of covenantal remembrance are partially maintained. Sacrificial Remembrance Sacrifices were made for many reasons in Biblical worship, including the ratification of covenants with God (Gen. 15: 8–18; Ex. 24: 3–8; Ps. 50: 5). W.O.E. Oesterley identifies three main purposes of sacrifice: ‘as gifts to the Deity, as a means of union with Him, and as a means of liberating life’.76 The close connection between the Hebrew conception of sacrifice and ideas about remembrance is demonstrated in the sacrificial term ’azkārāh which is derived from the zkr root. The development of the meaning of this term is the subject of ongoing debate, although it certainly refers to some portion of the vegetable sacrifice described in Lev. 2: 2, where a mixture of flour, oil and perfume is burnt as an offering, resulting in a sweet-smelling smoke.

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The major part of this sort of offering would have been consumed by the priests presiding over the ritual, so it has been suggested that the term ’azkārāh refers to that part of the sacrifice which is burned on the altar as a representative offering to God, and acts as a ‘reminder’ of the whole sacrifice.77 Another explanation of the etymology of ’azkārāh connects it with the pronouncement of God’s name which always accompanied a sacrificial offering.78 Sacrifices can be thought of as a form of worship dedicated to the remembrance of God, in which man’s covenantal relationship with God finds expression.79 As with the covenantal form of remembrance, sacrificial remembrance ultimately involves the mutual remembrance of God and man of each other. Whereas God founds covenantal agreements, it falls upon man to observe sacrificial rituals (albeit that these are believed to have been divinely formulated), so that the customary direction of remembrance in the sacrifices described in the Hebrew Bible is of man remembering God. In his appeal to God in the sacrificial ritual, man hopes to solicit God’s attention and favour, and, ultimately, his remembrance. The memorial implications of the sacrificial ritual context most productively illuminate the human address to God which sacrifices entail and which I will be discussing in relation to the literary remembrance of the Holocaust. The discussion of sacrificial remembrance in connection with the remembrance of the Holocaust necessarily raises the problematic etymological associations of the word ‘Holocaust’ itself. ‘Holocaust’ derives from the Greek translation in the Septuagint of the Hebrew word for a sacrificial offering which is intended to be burned, olah. Naomi Seidman considers the specific significance of ‘Holocaust’ as a translated term of Judaeo-Christianity, in the context of the politics of Jewish and Christian difference.80 Berel Lang describes the evolution of the usage of the term ‘Holocaust’ including its emergence as a designation of the Nazi persecution of the Jews and acknowledges that ‘the original meaning and connotations of that term have to an extent been superseded by its recent usage’.81 While some ultra-Orthodox Jewish thinkers do interpret the six million deaths in the Holocaust in terms of a religious sacrifice,82 this kind of retrospective explanation of the suffering and death inflicted on the Jews by the Nazis is more commonly perceived as offensive, since none of the conditions traditionally used to account for sacrificial ritual contexts applied in the case of the Nazi genocide. Specifically, there is absolutely no redemptive quality to the Jewish suffering arising from the Nazi persecution.

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The literary texts which I consider later take up the denial of the possibility of redemption in connection with religious forms of remembrance after the Holocaust in relation to the ongoing possibilities for remembering the Holocaust itself. Judaeo-Christian remembrance, including sacrificial remembrance, is predicated upon various senses of a salvational relationship between man and God and conducted as an address between the (human or divine) remembering subject and their object of remembrance (divine or human). After the Holocaust, this form of remembrance and the corresponding relationship of address is no longer available in the same way. Theological and linguistic meaning is irreparably damaged. The structure of address between a remembering subject(s) and their addressee(s) is retained by literary texts, however, in their attempts to establish the linguistic conditions within which remembrance of the Holocaust might be possible, as a residual means of ‘saying in relation to’. The correspondences I suggest in subsequent chapters between the structures of address in particular literary genres and those of particular forms of Judaeo-Christian remembrance – between poetry and confession, novelistic prose and anamnesis, and drama and testament – relate to the connections between the dynamics of ‘saying’ in the respective literary and religious forms of address, between one or more speakers and one or more addressees. My focus on sacrifice in the context of remembrance inevitably excludes numerous other possible interpretations of sacrificial rituals in which alternative aspects are emphasized. Among the many philosophical and anthropological conceptions of sacrifice, that of Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment) is notable for its claim that the control of sacrificial rituals is not merely one among many methods of social control, but the primary mechanism from which all other societal power relations are derived. Horkheimer and Adorno maintain that all sacrifice is based on a false premise of representation which holds that it is possible for the sacrificial object to stand for another thing of higher value.83 They describe how the perpetuation of this sacrificial myth in which the sacrificial ritual is additionally a means of direct communication with the gods maintained priestly authority over their credulous congregation.84 Horkheimer and Adorno conduct their examination of the role of sacrifice in social relationships through an analysis of sacrifice in the myth of Odysseus. They show how Odysseus’s insight into the power relations entailed by the offering of sacrifices enables him to manipulate the ritual to his own advantage.

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Odysseus’s deceptive use of sacrifice for his personal gain is presented as the primary deception at the root of all social inequality.85 Horkheimer and Adorno’s thesis is of interest in relation to my consideration of sacrificial remembrance in the Hebrew Bible as a context for the literary remembrance of the Holocaust because it offers insight into how not only sacrifice, but forms of remembrance in general, may be implicated in power relations. The writers whose work I consider are self-conscious about this possibility in their efforts to write literary responses to what happened. The ways in which their texts challenge forms of religious remembrance, manifest anxieties over the possibility of accurate remembrance and solicit their addressees’ participation in the act of remembrance are examples of how they work to avoid inappropriately dogmatic narratorial authority. In the Bible the priestly teachings on sacrifice and the widespread corruption within sacrificial worship are criticized by the prophets (Hosea: 11: 2; Amos 4: 3–5; 5: 5) and the psalmists (Ps. 40: 6; 50: 8–14; 69: 30–14). The objections to sacrifice in the prophetic texts and the psalms are largely centred upon the attitudes of the people that make and administer the offerings, rather than the practice of sacrifice itself. Ritual sacrifice is meaningless unless it is offered in a spirit of obedience and attention to God (I Sam. 15: 22). Hosea makes a direct link between sacrifices which are not accepted by God and Israel having forgotten God (8: 13–14). Amos rejects sacrifices which are no longer offered in remembrance of God (5: 21–2). Similar pronouncements are found in Micah (6: 6–8) and Isaiah (1: 10–17). Sacrifices need to be offered in the right spirit for them to have any worth as forms of religious remembrance and if they are not to deteriorate into empty ritual. The most progressive view is that of Jeremiah, who not only condemns sacrifice (7: 22) but also imagines a new covenant based on moral obedience to God under which sacrifices, other ritual observances, and priestly teachings of all kinds would be redundant (31: 33–4). As Dennis King Keenan observes in his recent study of the evolution of sacrificial ideas in Western culture: ‘Sacrifice has to be beyond calculation and hope of a reward, so as not to be construed as self-serving (and, therefore, not a genuine sacrifice)’.86 Sacrifice, then, should be understood as a form of remembrance undertaken for its own sake, commensurate with the principle of remembrance as Vergegenwärtigung, and with the understanding of literary remembrance of the Holocaust which I discuss in detail in relation to novelistic prose in Chapter Three.

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The Book of Deuteronomy, often singled out by Biblical commentators for its focus on remembrance, represents the culmination of the collective prophetic teachings on sacrificial worship and provides a codification of permitted sacrificial practice.87 The Deuteronomist’s combination of the frequent injunctions for man to remember God with the revised account of sacrificial rituals emphasizes the centrality of sacrifice as a form of remembrance within Biblical theology. As such, the account of sacrifices in Deuteronomy shows the worshipper, ‘in grateful remembrance of God’s past mercies’.88 The sacrificial ritual and the offering itself are merely means to this end of remembrance of God. Participation in the ritual by making sacrificial offerings, so long as this is undertaken for the right reason of remembering and praising God, rather than attempting to appease or bribe him, will bring man closer to God and ensure God’s remembrance of the participating individual or group, so that the sacrifices ultimately reinforce the mutual bonds of covenantal remembrance. Sacrificial rituals in the Hebrew Bible may be intended to atone for sins committed by individuals or the community as a whole, but these sins are always understood as a breach of the covenantal relationship with God. H.H. Rowley describes how sacrifice necessarily involves confession of sin.89 Sacrifices are understood as reparation – through the right remembrance of God, repentance and restitution – for the damage done to the covenant. Michael Fishbane examines ‘the transfiguration of sacrifice in Jewish thought and practice’ by presenting a number of scriptural examples in which confessional practices are shown to have evolved from rituals of sacrificial atonement.90 These in turn informed the development of Christian confessional practices. Oesterley provides an extensive account of the confessional elements in the pre-Christian Jewish liturgy and points to their origin in the Temple Service as an evolution of sacrificial rituals.91 He discusses the Jewish tradition of penitential and confessional prayer as exemplified in Nehemiah: 9, which he claims ‘may be regarded, though in a restricted sense, as a Catholic sentiment in Judaism’.92 The objections to worshippers’ attitudes to the sacrificial rituals in the Biblical prophetic writings and the psalms share the same basis as the critique of Holocaust remembrance made by Adorno, Wiesel and Friedlander: in order for participation in religious ritual or acts of remembrance generally to be meaningful within its own terms, it must be undertaken actively. Passive complicity in remembrance fails to do justice to what is being remembered, be this the divine authority of the

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Hebrew Bible or the human suffering and death of Holocaust literature. When remembrance is experienced as Vergegenwärtigung those remembering are necessarily actively involved, having chosen to remember for the sake of remembering and to participate in an actualization of what is remembered which leads them to a corresponding reorientation of their relations with others. The articulation of remembrance of the Holocaust in the literary texts is structurally similar to remembrance as Vergegenwärtigung in JudaeoChristian religious ritual, but for the readers of those texts participation in remembrance is not mandatory, incorporating the realization of the Biblical prophets in relation to sacrificial remembrance, that participation is only meaningful if voluntarily undertaken, as an act valued for its own sake. Horkheimer and Adorno show how the enforcement role of the priests in relation to sacrificial ritual contributes to its deceptive instatement as an ongoing mechanism of social control in secularized society.93 In their analysis, even the first primitive forms of sacrifice were inevitably also connected with a desire for power.94 Horkheimer and Adorno’s thesis is just one of the many sorts of challenge to Judaeo-Christian forms of worship taken into account by the authors writing in response to the Holocaust whose texts reconfigure those ritual contexts. If their texts enact Vergegenwärtigung they also enact various conceptual and sociological challenges to Vergegenwärtigung. The Evolution of Christian Forms of Remembrance Maurice Halbwachs provides a comprehensive sociological account of the evolution of religious memory, using Christianity as a case study. His discussion focuses upon the ways in which the emergent Christian religion defined itself in opposition to Judaism. According to Halbwachs, any developing society must preserve certain key beliefs and memories about its own past in order to guarantee its continuity.95 Thus, when a new religion is in the process of being formed, its proponents must find a means to make the new beliefs acceptable to potential adherents in such a way that they do not completely invalidate all previous beliefs. So, in addition to re-evaluating the society’s historical self-understanding in terms of the new framework of beliefs, enduring elements from the past will be assimilated into the new ideas. For the new religion to gain credence the ‘forms of the past’ must be preserved, and new beliefs are embedded within ‘a totality of remembrances, traditions, and familiar ideas’.96 This is the sociological

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logic by which the relationship between Christian and Jewish forms of remembrance is understood. Christian memory survived by assimilating some beliefs which were chronologically close to its own, through the ritualization of existing beliefs, and through the conversion of others with different religious beliefs. My thesis about the way in which Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance, even where they are discredited and sometimes precisely by virtue of their being discredited, offer ways of structuring the textual address in literary attempts to respond to the Holocaust shares aspects of Halbwachs’s understanding of the development of religious memory. Just as the emerging Christian tradition established itself both in terms of Judaism and in opposition to it, ostensibly post-theological secular forms of remembrance, including that of the Holocaust, define themselves in relation to theological forms of remembrance, even where that relation is one of rejection. The literary remembrance of the Holocaust thereby involves what Benjamin referred to as the ‘concealed dwarf ’ of theology, which corresponds to Halbwachs’s sense of the evolution of religious remembrance. Halbwachs maintains that a religious truth is always ‘at the same time a traditional remembrance and a general notion’.97 He identifies ritual as the means whereby a religion preserves and defends the memory of its established beliefs. Halbwachs outlines the conflicting demands upon religious ritual to preserve a true form of remembrance, while also sustaining a dialogue with the contemporary concerns of the religious community. Dogmatic interpretations of religious rituals emerge when their meaning and relevance to the community is not immediately apparent, such as when the memory of the original events has faded. In these circumstances in respect of any religion, mysticism frequently plays an important role in extending remembrance and experience beyond the bounds of the canonical texts sanctioned by the religious authorities. Mysticism offers a more intense religious experience than that which is possible within the terms of a prevailing dogmatic viewpoint, so that ‘We can … contrast mysticism with dogmatism as lived remembrance versus tradition more or less reduced to formulas’.98 The mystical experience of Christian sacramental remembrance seeks to bypass the church’s teachings and participate directly in the event that the sacrament commemorates.99 According to many commentators, perhaps more credulous than Halbwachs, what he describes as a mystical sacramental encounter is simply the essence of sacramental worship. Paul Connerton discusses the ‘sacramental performativity, by virtue of which the celebrant, in

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repeating those words in the context of the prayer of the canon, is held to be restoring to them their primary performativity’.100 This kind of understanding of the aims of ritualistic forms of religious remembrance also underpins discussions of Biblical remembrance in terms of actualization or Vergegenwärtigung. The actualization involved in some versions of the literary remembrance of the Holocaust, notably in the prose texts and the drama which I discuss in Chapters Three and Four, which can be connected back to the ritual context of Judaeo-Christian remembrance via the similar structures of address, is one example of the persistence of the interconnections between religious traditions and other forms of discourse, identified by Halbwachs and Benjamin. At its outset, then, many aspects of Christian belief and practice were difficult to distinguish from the contemporary life of other social and religious groups. In this early period, Christian practices of worship were diverse and varied substantially between different Christian communities, before rites were eventually unified and became fixed. Hurtado explains how Judaism ‘provided the initial conceptual categories by which to interpret the religious experiences that provoked the earliest Christian convictions’.101 This is one way of understanding the centrality of remembrance in general and Vergegenwärtigung in particular within the emerging Christian tradition. Early Christian beliefs and worship relied extensively upon the varied Jewish tradition incorporating ‘Jewish forms and expressions’102 and adopting Jewish synagogal practice.103 These borrowings from Judaism would not have been perceived in this way by the early Christian community, who in any case thought of themselves as Jewish.104 Wright remarks that, ‘The Scripture of Jesus was the Old Testament’.105 Whereas, in its earliest phases, Christian remembrance was inevitably and explicitly constituted as Jewish remembrance, subsequent modes of Christian remembrance rejected any sense of a connection with the Jewish context. After the Holocaust, in many of the literary texts I examine, this process is reversed and the point is repeatedly made that Christian forms of remembrance need now more than ever to recognize their Jewish heritage in addition to explicitly extending their frame of reference to remember Jewish suffering – and Christian complicity in that suffering – during the Holocaust. The literary texts demonstrate that, in their habitual failure to attend to the Jewish origins of Christian remembrance and to acknowledge Jewish suffering, Christian forms of remembrance only exacerbate the already widespread sense of their redundancy.

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The connection between Christian beliefs and forms of remembrance and their Jewish antecedents is inevitably fraught. There have been numerous studies of these connections, emphasizing different aspects of the shared tradition. Oesterley, for example, examines the Jewish antecedents for Christian sacramental worship, including the Eucharist and confession. In this context he proposes that the form of words celebrating the Eucharist is an adaptation of the words of the Jewish Kiddûsh, which includes elements of commemoration.106 Whereas Oesterley posits a literal scriptural connection between the Jewish Kaddish prayer and the Christian sacrament, in Chapter Three I explore the figurative connections between the two in the context of Imre Kertész’s novella, Kaddish for a Child Not Born. After the Holocaust, in view of Christian complicity with, if not participation in, what happened, remembrance of Christ’s death in the principal Christian sacrament must always also occur alongside remembrance of Jewish suffering and death. In his polemical book, The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition, Arthur A. Cohen develops a number of different historical perspectives in order to challenge the misguided idea of a smooth evolution of Christian ideas and practice from the Jewish faith. Whereas Halbwachs emphasizes continuities between Jewish and Christian ideas and faith in order to support his thesis about collective memory, Cohen privileges the discontinuities which Christianity aggressively asserted in order to establish its difference from the older religion. Cohen claims that the intellectual recognition of the reliance of Christianity upon Judaism was eventually made during the Enlightenment, but only in the context of the disillusionment with religion engendered by the long, bloody wars waged in the name of God which were in fact in the service of worldly power-mongers. He elucidates the negative significance of the phrase ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’, which he characterizes as ‘a coming to terms on the part of Christian scholarship with the Jewish factor in Christian civilization’.107 Cohen is among many thinkers writing after the Holocaust who point out that the historical Christian failure to recognize its Jewish heritage was part of the prevailing attitude of anti-Semitism which made it possible for the Holocaust to take place.108 I return to this view repeatedly in my discussion of the relationship between the literary texts and religious forms of remembrance in subsequent chapters. In the texts I consider, references to Christian worship nearly always serve to demonstrate the necessary transformation of the post-Holocaust Christian memorial obligation.

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Forms of Remembrance I have shown how the concept of zkr in the Hebrew Bible is a vital component of the Jewish religion, which features in important ways both in that religion’s ideas and in its faith. The ways in which remembrance occurs in the Hebrew Bible invariably entail an active rather than a passive role on the part of the remembering subject, be they divine or human. The conceptions of covenant and sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible can be variously connected with the New Testament forms of Eucharistic and confessional remembrance. Lawrence A. Hoffman describes how, ‘Both Jewish and Christian services look forward and backward simultaneously, collapsing time into a single worship moment – that is, they remember time past when a covenant was initiated and look ahead to a messianic future when the covenantal promise will be realized.’109 Ideas advanced about Vergegenwärtigung in the Hebrew Bible relate to the Christian understanding of sacramental remembrance, and these ideas inform my discussions of confession, Eucharistic anamnesis and testament in the following chapters. The observation that forms of remembrance and forms of religious worship are bound together is an old one. My discussion of ‘Religion, Remembrance and Ritual’ reflects the rich tradition of commentary on the interconnections between memorial and religious ritual practices. The suggestion that apparently secular modes of thinking, including thinking about remembrance, may involve theological structures is also well-established. Adorno and Benjamin’s formulations of the memorial responsibilities pertaining to historical suffering, for example, involve a debt to theological categories of thought. Introducing his thesis of social memory, Connerton writes that, ‘the fact that we no longer believe in the great “subjects” of history – the proletariat, the party, the West – means, not the disappearance of these great masternarratives, but rather their continuing unconscious effectiveness as ways of thinking about and acting in our contemporary situation: their persistence, in other words, as unconscious collective memories’.110 My argument about the desanctification of religious forms of remembrance in the context of the literary remembrance of the Holocaust can be framed in similar terms. The consideration of the relationships between memorial discourses in society at large and religious ritual practice has taken on new dimensions after the Holocaust, in the context of the unprecedented challenges posed by what happened both for public and

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private forms of memory and for theology. There is a widely perceived sense, articulated by Yerushalmi, Friedlander and others of the coexistence of irreconcilable memorial traditions, represented by historiographical and religious approaches to memory. If, after the Holocaust, any form of remembrance is going to be capable of fulfilling the complex ethical obligations of remembering an event which Elie Wiesel has characterized as a ‘war against memory’,111 it will need to accomplish some form of synthesis of the hitherto distinct memorial discourses. Benjamin’s reflections on how the discipline of history might productively be expanded to encompass memorial obligations towards past sufferings, discussed at the beginning of this chapter, prophetically set out the same sort of ideas – before his suicide in 1940 in anticipation of his likely fate as a Jew in central Europe. The suggestion is often made that literature will produce forms of remembrance which will bridge the different ways of remembering. Friedlander and Greenberg envisage literary responses to the Holocaust as forming a kind of ‘secular liturgy’ – a desanctified ritual context which will bring together people of different faiths and no faith in a shared understanding of what is owed to the dead. The remainder of this book is concerned with one possible way of understanding literature’s response to the Holocaust. I will show how the structures of address employed to articulate remembrance of the Holocaust in literary texts may be understood as desanctified reconfigurations of the structures of address involved in JudaeoChristian forms of remembrance. The literary texts I will examine perform remembrance of the Holocaust in ways which can be compared with the Biblical context of remembrance described as Vergegenwärtigung. Through their operation within the memorial logic of Vergegenwärtigung – which, in its capacity to reveal the present implications of past events is like the theological-historical model of ‘actualization’ proposed by Benjamin within his conception of historical materialism – the literary texts establish intertextual conditions which approach the requirements for active remembrance in relation to the Holocaust by thinkers like Adorno, Wiesel and Friedlander. The particular ways in which the texts encourage Vergegenwärtigung vary depending on the literary genre being used and the structures of address that this entails, but they all ultimately seek to make possible an ethical reorientation on the part of the remembering subject. The following chapters, in which poetic, prose and dramatic texts are considered in turn, include literary works by authors who grew up

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within the Jewish and Christian traditions. I am interested in the ways in which – both despite and because of their various rejections of religious experience – their respective literary forms might be said to relate to particular forms of Judaeo-Christian sacramental remembrance which have a shared origin in the Biblical sense of zkr. In their demonstration of the redundancy of theological modes of address after the Holocaust, and their reconfiguration of these structures of address in order to create the linguistic conditions within which remembrance of the Holocaust might be possible, they enact the inevitable failure of any such attempt at remembrance. The literary texts stage the failure of theological address in order to attest to the failure of linguistic relations after the Holocaust. Yet the mode of address which is precisely the location of the failure of remembrance is also the place where the text establishes an intertextual possibility of forming an intersubjective relation. In remembering the Holocaust they preserve Horkheimer’s shattering knowledge that ‘The slain are really slain’, but they also seek to make this knowledge count in the present, in Benjamin’s sense of memorial ‘redemption’. The literary texts I will consider approach this feat of Vergegenwärtigung, or making the past count in the present, by demonstrating the failure of any theological sense of redemption and the interconnected failure of linguistic meaning and thereby establishing the conditions of address within which it is even possible to speak, disconsolately, of what happened during the Holocaust. NOTES 1. See T.W. Adorno, Eingriffe: Neun kritische Modelle (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), p.128. 2. Ibid., p.142. 3. E. Wiesel, ‘Die Massenvernichtung als literarische Inspiration’, in Eugen Kogon (ed.), Gott nach Auschwitz: Dimensionen des Massenmords am jüdischen Volk (Freiburg: Herder, 1989), pp.21–50, see p.43. 4. W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–), Volume 1, N9,7, pp.591–2. 5. Ibid., N9a,6, pp.592–3. 6. Ibid., N2,2, p.574. 7. Ibid., N8,1, p.589. 8. Ibid., N8,1, p.589. 9. Ibid., p.693. 10. I. Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History, trans. R.P. Scheindlin (Philadelphia, PA and Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1993), p.5. 11. E. Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, trans. E. Palmer (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1973), p.517.

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12. Ibid., p.518. 13. Ibid., p.516. 14. J. Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’, trans. S. Weber, in J. Derrida and G. Vattimo (eds), Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp.1–78, see p.37. 15. H. Gadamer, ‘Dialogues in Capri’, trans. J. Gaiger, in J. Derrida and G. Vattimo (eds), Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp.200–11, see pp.200–1, 206–8. 16. F.D.E. Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Hans-Joachim Birkner (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980–), pp.61–2. 17. E. de Pressensé, The Ancient World and Christianity, trans. A. Harwood Holmden (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1888), p.4. 18. M. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. L.A. Coser (Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p.84. 19. Ibid., pp.84–119, 43. 20. Ibid., pp.91–2. 21. D. Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory, trans. S. Lee (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p.97. 22. Ibid., p.87. 23. P. Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp.4–5. 24. Ibid., p.46. 25. Ibid., p.60. 26. Ibid., pp.68–70. 27. G. Lewis, Day of Shining Red: An Essay on Understanding Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp.9–33, see p.23. 28. A.H. Friedlander, ‘Sachor im jüdischen Denken durch die Jahrtausende’, in S. Hödl and E. Lappin (eds), Erinnerung als Gegenwart: Jüdische Gedenkkulturen (Berlin: Philo, 2000), p.19. 29. Ibid., p.27. 30. See Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, p.695. 31. See Friedlander, ‘Sachor im jüdischen Denken’, p.13. 32. Ibid., p.13. 33. Revd W. Warren, The Relation of Ritual to the Essentials of the Christian Religion (Cambridge: Deighton Bell, 1880), p.49. 34. C.R. Smith, The Bible Doctrine of Salvation: A Study of the Atonement (London: The Epworth Press, 1955), p.86. 35. M.A. Signer (ed.), Memory and History in Christianity and Judaism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), p.ix. 36. Y.H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, WA and London: University of Washington Press, 1982), p.xiv. 37. Ibid., p.99. 38. Ibid., p.100. 39. A. Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley, CA and Oxford: University of California Press, 1993), p.8. 40. G.E. Wright, The Challenge of Israel’s Faith (London: SCM, 1946), p.42. 41. See Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, p.11. 42. Ibid., pp.18–20.

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43. See, for example, L.L. Honor, ‘The Role of Memory in Biblical History’, in M. Davis (ed.), Mordecai M. Kaplan: Jubilee Volume (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1953), pp.417–35, see p.422ff; H. Zirker, Die kultische Vergegenwärtigung der Vergangenheit in den Psalmen (Bonn: Peter Hanstein, 1964), p.3; Wiesel, ‘Die Massenvernichtung als literarische Inspiration’, p.21; Yerushalmi, Zakhor, p.9; R.J. Ginn, The Present and the Past: A Study of Anamnesis (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1989), p.3; S. Laube, Fest, Religion und Erinnerung: Konfessionelles Gedächtnis in Bayern von 1804 bis 1917 (Munich: Beck, 1999), p.27; Friedlander, ‘Sachor im jüdischen Denken‘, p.16; Signer (ed.), Memory and History in Christianity and Judaism, p.ix. 44. See Friedlander, ‘Sachor im jüdischen Denken’, p.16. 45. P.A.H. de Boer, Gedenken und Gedächtnis in der Welt des Alten Testaments (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960), p.29. 46. G.J. Botterweck and H. Ringgren (eds), Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, Volume IV, trans. D.E. Green (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), p.65. 47. B.S. Childs, Memory and Tradition in Israel (London: SCM, 1962), p.50. 48. See Botterweck and Ringgren (eds), Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, p.66. 49. See Childs, Memory and Tradition in Israel, p.18. 50. Ibid., p.22. 51. A.J. Heschel, ‘The Jewish Notion of God and Christian Renewal’, in F.A. Rothschild (ed.), Jewish Perspectives on Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1990), pp.325–40, see p.335. 52. See Childs, Memory and Tradition in Israel, pp.31–2. 53. Botterweck and Ringgren (eds), Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, p.70. 54. Childs, Memory and Tradition in Israel, p.34. 55. See Botterweck and Ringgren (eds), Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, p.71. 56. See Childs, Memory and Tradition in Israel, p.33. 57. C. Gore, H.L. Goudge and A. Guillame (eds), A New Commentary on Holy Scripture (London: SPCK, 1951), p.148. 58. See Childs, Memory and Tradition in Israel, p.55. 59. Ibid., p.50. 60. Zirker, Die kultische Vergegenwärtigung der Vergangenheit in den Psalmen, p.11. 61. Ibid., p.46. 62. See Wright, The Challenge of Israel’s Faith, p.89. 63. See Childs, Memory and Tradition in Israel, p.51. 64. I. Greenberg, ‘Voluntary Covenant’, in S.L. Jacobs (ed.), Contemporary Jewish Responses to the Shoah (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993), pp.70–105, see pp.90–105. 65. S.L. Jacobs, Rethinking Jewish Faith (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994), see pp.23–7. 66. H. Küng, Das Judentum (Munich: Piper, 1991), p.60. 67. B.C. Birch, W. Brueggemann, T.E. Fretheim and D.L. Petersen (eds), A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1999), p.63.

50 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

Forgetting to Remember See Wright, The Challenge of Israel’s Faith, p.98. See Greenberg, ‘Voluntary Covenant’, p.80. Ibid., p.98. M. Noth, ‘Die Vergegenwärtigung des Alten Testaments in der Verkündigung’, Evangelische Theologie, 12 (1952), pp.6–17, see p.12. See Heschel, ‘The Jewish Notion of God and Christian Renewal’, p.328. W. Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament: Volume One, trans. J. Baker (London: SCM, 1961), p.38. See Zirker, Die kultische Vergegenwärtigung der Vergangenheit, pp.95–6. See Noth, ‘Die Vergegenwärtigung des Alten Testaments’, p.14. W.O.E. Oesterley, Sacrifices in Ancient Israel (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1937), p.11. See Gore, Goudge and Guillame, A New Commentary on Holy Scripture, p.656. Ibid., p.80. W. Dyrness, Themes in Old Testament Theology (Exeter: The Paternoster Press, 1979), p.125. N. Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp.214–16. B. Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), pp.xxvi–xxvii. See G. Greenberg, ‘Ultra-Orthodox Reflections on the Holocaust: 1945 to the Present’, in K. Kwiet and J. Matthäus (eds), Contemporary Responses to the Holocaust (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004), pp.87–122. M. Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam: Querido, 1947), p.20. Ibid., p.66. Ibid., p.73. D.K. Keenan, The Question of Sacrifice (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), p.1. See Gore, Goudge and Guillame, A New Commentary on Holy Scripture, p.654. Ibid. H.H. Rowley, The Faith of Israel (London: SCM, 1961), p.95. M. Fishbane, The Exegetical Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp.123–35. W.O.E. Oesterley, The Jewish Basckground of the Christian Liturgy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925), p.79. Ibid., p.53. See Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, pp.67 and 71. Ibid., p.67. See Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p.86. Ibid. Ibid., p.106. Ibid., p.107. Ibid., p.118. See Connerton, How Societies Remember, p.68. L.W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (London: SCM, 1988), p.94. See Warren, The Relation of Ritual, p.26.

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103. See Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p.96. 104. See Warren, The Relation of Ritual, p.26; B. Chilton and J. Neusner, Judaism in the New Testament (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p.xiv; A. StewartSykes and J.H. Newman, Early Jewish Liturgy: A Sourcebook for Use by Students of Early Christian Liturgy (Cambridge: Grove Books, 2001), p.3. 105. See Wright, The Challenge of Israel’s Faith, p.19. 106. See Oesterley, The Jewish Background of the Christian Liturgy, p.190. 107. A.A. Cohen, The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p.xviii. 108. Ibid., p.199. 109. L.A. Hoffman, ‘Jewish and Christian Liturgy’, in T. Frymer-Kensky, D. Novak, P. Ochs, D. Fox Sandmel and M.A. Signer, Christianity in Jewish Terms (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), pp.175–89, see pp.175–6. 110. See Connerton, How Societies Remember, p.1. 111. E. Wiesel and M. de Saint-Cheron, Evil and Exile, trans. J. Rothschild and J. Gladding (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), p.155.

2

Poetry as Confession: Paul Celan and Geoffrey Hill The tongue’s atrocities. Poetry Unearths from among the speechless dead. (Geoffrey Hill, ‘History as Poetry’)

T

he question of the relation between confession and poetry written in response to the Holocaust is part of a broader discussion about ways of representing the Holocaust. This discussion has been developed in the large number of studies devoted to the subject of Holocaust literature which have been published in the last thirty years, and has included some examination of the religious aspects and the theological implications of writing about the Holocaust, although without particular reference to confession.1 Andrea Reiter introduces her literary analysis of survivor testimonies, Narrating the Holocaust, by posing a series of questions about narrative perspective. Reiter foregrounds ‘The questions of when, by whom, and from what viewpoint the story is being told’, and asks whether these ‘have a crucial influence upon the process of linguistic expression itself, [as well as the] conditions and possibilities’ of this expression. She asks, ‘Which linguistic devices, which genres, do the survivors rely upon to communicate their experiences?’2 The basis of the thesis I wish to develop here is the observation that the confessional mode is one among many modes of linguistic expression adopted by those writing about the Holocaust to help formulate a response to what happened. Confession provides an established pattern for the recollection of shameful or traumatic past events and for their literary representation, and it offers an established formal context within which this difficult act of speech can take place. The confessional mode of address also establishes a possible way for the remembering subject to orientate

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themselves in relation to their addressee. It deserves highlighting because of the theological, ethical and aesthetic questions which are raised by strategies such as placing literary adaptations of the Roman Catholic sacrament of penance in the context of crimes perpetrated against the Jewish people, among others.3 Confession is by no means the only form of address in poetry responding to the Holocaust, nor is confession exclusively connected with the poetic genre, but thinking about poetry as confessional helps to illuminate what is at stake, both theologically and linguistically, in the poetic act of Holocaust remembrance. The partiality and inadequacy of the confessional model are themselves aspects of the confessional poetic response to the Holocaust. The literary reinterpretation of confessional remembrance demonstrates the inevitable insufficiency of Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance after the Holocaust. The poetry I consider here for its use of confessional structures and imagery is written by two authors from different religious backgrounds and different perspectives in relation to the Holocaust: Paul Celan (1920–70), who grew up as a Jew, and Geoffrey Hill (1932–), who was brought up in the Anglican tradition. In this chapter I examine the ways in which Celan’s and Hill’s methodological statements support my understanding of their poetry as confession. I then explore the expression and the enactment of confession in Celan’s and Hill’s poetry, and the ways in which these are complicated as a response to the Holocaust, via analysis of individual poems and poetic sequences. In the sections entitled ‘Tenebrae’ and ‘Balsam and Gall’ I discuss some areas of thematic congruity in Celan’s and Hill’s work and show how these relate to the confessional aspect of their poetry. I show how in the confessional tropes, and most crucially in the confessional act through which their poetic utterance is constituted, Celan and Hill approach the daily duty of remembrance of the nameless and ‘outnumbering dead’.4 It is through this latter sense of ritual enactment that their poetry comes to participate in an ethical act of remembrance, in its reorientation of the ‘I’ of the poetic voice in relation to the ‘you’ who is being addressed. In the absence of an ordained confessor and thus of any possibility of absolution, the poetic mode of confessional utterance remains incomplete and sometimes falls silent. This necessarily disconsolate form of remembrance – predicated upon its own inadequacy – is one of the poetic ways of responding to the moral and linguistic disorders which are consequences of the Holocaust. The ethical aspect of the intersubjective reorientation sought by the confessional address in Celan’s and Hill’s poetry is illuminated by

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Emmanuel Levinas’s conception of speaking to another person as the basis for ethical relations. His most thoroughgoing treatment of this issue takes place in his book Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974). Levinas distinguishes between the act of saying and what is said (‘le dire et le dit’), positing the ongoing communicative intention of speech as a moral act against the morally dubious presumption that it is possible to know anything about the other inherent in static linguistic content. Although, as Richard A. Cohen observes, Levinas invariably ‘grants primacy to ethics over epistemology and aesthetics’,5 Robert Eaglestone’s study of Levinas in relation to literary criticism has demonstrated how his thinking about language in Otherwise than Being might form the basis for literary criticism conceived as ‘interruption’.6 The congruities between Levinas’s ethics and some conceptions of literarature become explicit at various junctures in his collection of essays, Proper Names, in which Levinas engages with the work of other philosophers and writers. In his 1972 essay on Paul Celan which analyses Celan’s account of poetry in his Georg Büchner Prize speech of 1960, ‘Der Meridian’ (‘The Meridian’), Levinas shows how the intersubjective ethical relation might find expression in a literary context. Levinas’s privileging of the act of saying over the said has a literary correlation in the way in which for Celan, ‘The fact of speaking to the other – the poem – precedes all thematization’.7 Furthermore, Levinas explicitly relates the intersubjective orientation in Celan’s poetry to the Holocaust.8 Michael Eskin discusses Levinas’s sense of ethics as ‘response-ability’ to the other and Celan’s dialogic poetry as related responses to National Socialism, and analyses Levinas’s essay on Celan ‘as a sustained attempt to capture the relation between poetry and the ethical’.9 This chapter will explore the ways in which, for Celan and Hill, poetic saying after the Holocaust is conceived as an at once sustained and interrupted act of desanctified confessional remembrance. The conception of address that this entails – in which an indiviudal poetic speaker who, faced with God’s impotence or absence, seeks to establish the possibility of communicating with another person – makes possible an intertextual reorientation of the speaker in relation to their addressee. Confession The Jewish penitential liturgy has various traditions of confession in which worshippers acknowledge their sins and ask for God’s forgiveness. Ismar Elbogen gives an account of the different times in

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the liturgical calendar when selihot or penitential prayers are used.10 While Christian confessional practices certainly evolved from Jewish attitudes to human sin and divine forgiveness, the influential position of confession within Western culture is predominantly due to its significance within the institution of the Church.11 Jeremy Tambling describes the development of early Christian ideas about confession as a gradual shift away from private contrition towards the involvement of priests.12 At the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 the practice of repeated private confession to a priest was officially recognized and codified as the sacrament of penance. Thomas Aquinas recommended the synthesis of the acts of penance to be performed by the penitent and the words of absolution pronounced by the confessor to constitute the sacrament of penance as a whole.13 The sacrament of penance is now generally considered to have four components: contrition, confession, satisfaction and absolution. There is an ongoing debate within the Church about where the emphasis should be placed within the sacrament, with the modern focus tending to be on absolution.14 The word ‘confession’ is often used to stand for all elements of the sacrament, not just for the distinct act of voicing one’s sins, and so frequently becomes a metonym for the sacrament of penance as a whole. Confession is one of the seven sacraments in the Roman Catholic Church. Catholic theologians make clear that God’s capacity for forgiveness is not limited to the sacrament of penance.15 Neither are confessional practices limited to Roman Catholicism: variants can be found in the worship of many other Christian denominations, including the Anglican Church.16 Jack C. Winslow highlights passages from John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion recommending different forms of confessional practice to illustrate the widespread use of confession.17 Mike Hepworth describes how within Protestantism confession is expressed ‘through the Protestant diary as a devotional form, through the Wesleyan class meeting and penitential band, and through the Quaker testimony’.18 The value of confessional practices in religious terms is in their capacity to bring the penitent closer to God. All sin constitutes sin against God and takes the believer further away from God, but contrition for sin together with the other components of the sacrament of penance bring the penitent back towards God, restoring a relationship of mutual love.19 As Tambling points out in the introduction to his literary study of confession, even within the sacrament of penance itself, confessional practices are widely different so that ‘There is no essential form of words or actions called “confession”’.20

Poetry as Confession: Paul Celan and Geoffrey Hill

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Geoffrey Hill has repeatedly decried in lectures and interviews the confessional impulse in modern poetry,21 and so to claim that Hill’s poetry can be understood according to a confessional hermeneutic is clearly to mean something very different from the ‘outpouring of human emotions’ in the kind of poetry commonly described as ‘confessional’.22 In his inaugural lecture at the University of Leeds in 1977, ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement”’, Hill distinguishes between two types of guiltiness. He describes the trivial sense of culpability or ‘anxiety’ in which we are inevitably implicated through our daily lives, and the more profound concept of sinfulness by which we live and die. Both Hill’s and Celan’s poetry is concerned with this latter sense of sin, where everything is always at stake. Both poets operate within terms which can be applied to sacramental confession. Their poetry uses language to articulate guilt. The opening piece of Hill’s The Orchards of Syon (2002) contains the boast that, ‘I can prolong the act at times / to rival Augustine’.23 In Hill’s and Celan’s poetry the confessional act may sometimes express a particular, personally felt guilt, but it is always related to their sense of the guilt inherent in human existence; Hill even professes his attachment to an ‘old-fashioned’ idea of Original Sin.24 An important source of guilt for Hill is ‘the neglect of the dead, and a refusal to acknowledge what we owe to them’ prevalent in modern society.25 This is coupled with an acute awareness of having been born too late to have played a part in either of the World Wars. As Jeffrey Wainwright notes, ‘Péguy’s phrase “simply because I have not been there” is at the heart of [Hill’s] witness’.26 Antony Rowland frames what he terms Hill’s ‘awkward poetics’ in terms of his ‘nonparticipation’ in the Second World War.27 Hill’s first volume of poetry, For the Unfallen (1959), is concerned with what Hugh Haughton calls ‘the burden of surviving’ various kinds of historical catastrophe.28 This is like the guilt which underpins the confessional relation in Celan’s poetry: the guilt of being a Jew who survived the Holocaust. The concomitant duty to remember the dead is present even in those of Celan’s early poems which were written towards the end of the Second World War.29 Despite Celan’s sense of having been unjustly spared, John Bayley describes how Hill ‘is preoccupied with the gap between Celan’s experience and his poetry … [I]f poetry (Hill’s poetry) can in its own way become that distance, it justifies itself ’.30 Similarly, Rowland characterizes Hill’s The Triumph of Love as ‘a self-critique which emphasises that the post-Holocaust poet can only write selfconsciously as a secondary witness of historical events in Europe’.31 Rowland writes less convincingly on the relationship between Hill’s

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and Celan’s poetry, however, contending that ‘The influence of Celan’s terse and allusive poetics on Hill’s work as a whole is arguable … but elusive overall’.32 Bayley’s prescient interpretation of Hill’s attitude to Celan’s work invites us to view Hill’s response to Celan as one of confession, born of his own lack of experience of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, and prepares us for the multi-faceted correspondences between guilt and confession in Hill’s texts. While Hill’s view on the degree to which ‘confessional’ elements are a legitimate component of poetry has shifted over the years, the implications of this view for the way in which he writes remain unchanged. In an interview for The Paris Review he says, ‘I have come to see that the closest approximation of truth requires that the shortcomings of the self shall be admitted into the most intimate textures of the work’.33 This statement retains Hill’s long-standing suspicion of any crass unburdening on the part of the poet and points rather to the poet’s necessary ethical commitment to and within language. It remains closely aligned with Hill’s rejection of ‘a reckless confessional mode’ in modern poetry in an interview twenty years previously, and the remedy which he then prescribed of ‘an extreme concentration on technical discipline’.34 In The Paris Review Hill maintains that poetic truth requires that an admission of the truth about the self be embedded in the grain of the language. In a subsequent interview he elaborates on the linguistic make-up of the poetic fabric: ‘unless you have a kind of electrical energy sparking between the words and phrases, and between the phrases and the rhythms, of a poem, all the talk in the world about thematic significance is not going to help one jot’.35 Any meaning that is specific to poetry – as opposed to any other possible form of linguistic expression – must be a consequence of the poetic form and is thus derived from the kind of textual effects described above. In his essay ‘Dryden’s Prize-Song’ Hill characterizes the requirement for a disciplined poetic style in terms which are revealing for the debate about the artistic representation of the Holocaust: ‘Style is a seamless contexture of energy and order which, time after time, the effete and the crass somehow contrive to part between them; either paying tremulous lip-service to the “incomparable” and the “incommunicable” or else toadying to some current notion of the demotic.’36 Here Hill outlines some of the risks of failing to preserve the stylistic balance of ‘energy and order’. Hill has never wavered from the conviction that what is said in poetry must be subject to the arrangement of words which do the saying. While this is broadly true

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of linguistic expression in general, it is more true in relation to poetry – according to Hill’s sense of the ‘energetic’ operation of poetic language which is dependent on the particular rhythmic interactions between the words and phrases – than any other form of speech or literary genre. Confession, then, for Hill, while it may on occasion be a relatively straightforward profession of guilt in the manner of speaking which we associate with the Christian admission of personal sin before God, and the Roman Catholic confessional booth in particular, usually means something more fundamental than that. Confession is bound up with the poetic speech act itself, since truthful poetry demands the admission of ‘the shortcomings of the self ’ into its linguistic texture, in which the form of words is indivisible from the meaning of what is being said. This is why for Hill – and I will show how this claim also applies to Celan – poetry can be described as confession. So, in addition to its expression of guilt and penitence, the poetry of Celan and Hill is itself an enactment of a confessional idea. Hill describes poetry as ‘a form of responsible behaviour’.37 To wield language as a poet is to take responsibility for the form and meaning of utterance, so that writing is not just an expression of ideas about morality, but a moral act in itself. The moral dimension of poetic writing derives from the particularity of its diction, whereby each word has been deliberately chosen, not only for its own meaning and its own rhythmic and acoustic effects, but for the way in which it interacts with the other words around it; this lends a corresponding particularity to the poetic address, which is always directed towards another individual, referred to by Celan as ‘an addressable you’.38 Just as each word of a poetic text has been selected from a myriad of other possible words, so the addressee is conceived of as an individual uniquely capable of perceiving the particular significance and effects of the poetic language. In this way, poetry maintains the possibility of shared meaning, of meaningful encounter with and orientation towards the other within a confessional dialogue. Poetry of the kind which both Celan and Hill write is itself an act of confession. They use words in a measured, careful, painstaking way which concedes what they perceive to be the inevitably flawed condition of language and thereby announces human culpability. Celan describes language as irrecoverably ‘angereichert’ in his acceptance speech for the Bremen Prize for Literature in 1958, referring to the contaminated condition of the German language after the Third Reich as a dubious ‘enrichment’.39 Alain Suied elaborates upon the

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significance of this linguistic betrayal for Celan.40 While the German language unavoidably proclaims its Nazi heritage, in The Orchards of Syon, Hill describes ‘grammar / implicated in, interpreting, the Fall’.41 In his essay on the nature of language, ‘Our Word Is Our Bond’, Hill quotes the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonist, Benjamin Whichcote: ‘If it were not for Sin, we should converse together as Angels do’.42 The same quotation appears as an epigraph for his later collection of essays, Style and Faith (2003). Hill is attracted to Whichcote’s conception of an ideal form of angelic communication to which post-lapsarian language is always an inadequate successor. It is the task of poetry both to bear witness to these various forms of linguistic deficiency and to attempt to transcend them. As Celan puts it in his Bremen speech, ‘language must now pass through its own unanswerabilities, pass through terrible silence, pass through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech’.43 Ralph Pordzik’s attempt to contrast Celan’s and Hill’s approach to post-war poetic language is misguided.44 For both poets, all poetry is witnessing, but witnessing which is always also testifying to its own inadequacy as witness, its own treachery born of linguistic complicity. I am interested in how this sense of linguistic complicity results in a confessional poetic witnessing in which the texts admit Levinas’s recognition of the unavoidable betrayal of the act of saying by what is said. As Eskin writes, referring to Levinas’s Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, ‘just as any Said depends on Saying for its possibility, Saying depends on the Said for its witnessability and, according to Levinas, necessarily “manifests itself … by an abuse of language”’.45 Their reinterpretation of the confessional model of remembrance and exposure of its linguistic and theological inadequacies as an approach to remembering the Holocaust is part of how Celan and Hill articulate their various senses of the ‘abuse of language’ in their poetic texts. In their prose writings, Celan and Hill characterize poetry in almost identical terms, as a linguistic act which emerges from somewhere personal towards an encounter with the other. This is true at both the level of content and form of poetry. In ‘The Meridian’ Celan considers the capacity of the poem’s content to represent otherness, in spite of its origin deep within the self: ‘I think ... that it has always been one of the hopes of the poem ... to speak to something different – who knows, perhaps to something radically different.’46 Celan speaks of the poem’s ambition to bear witness to something which is radically other than itself. Hill’s formulation of the poetic purpose in his inaugural lecture is a more assured version of Celan’s: ‘From the depths of the

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self we rise to a concurrence with that which is not-self ’.47 While this aspiration for the action of poetic content may be simply and eloquently stated, its enactment in poetic practice is fraught, belonging to what Karen Leeder describes as a ‘crisis of address’ in twentiethcentury German poetry: ‘a new self-consciousness about who speaks, and how, and most significantly, whether the voice will ever be heard’.48 Shoshana Felman has portrayed Celan’s response to this literary ‘crisis of witnessing’ as the transformation of his entire poetic oeuvre into a ‘testimonial project of address’.49 In Celan’s and Hill’s poetry the otherness which the speaker strives to address is frequently the experience of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Their poems seek to bear witness to the impossible memories of suffering of the uncountable number of those who were murdered. They call to remembrance that which is irrecoverably lost. For both Celan and Hill poetic witnessing in response to the Holocaust is necessarily also confessional since it entails the acknowledgement of the distance of the poet from the death of the victims. For Hill this means the admission that these events occurred in his lifetime, but in his absence. For Celan it is a confession of his own survival in the face of devastating death. The fact of his survival, as a Jew, in the aftermath of the Holocaust becomes a cause for shame, so that even the role of bearing witness which is central to the possibility of poetic speech is benighted. In the work of both poets a consequence of the confessional relation is that the raison d’être of remembrance is itself tainted and called into question. Partly by virtue of its own inadequacy, the confessional address permits the simultaneous articulation of linguistic complicity in the events of the Holocaust and the interconnected sense of guilt for having survived to bear witness to and within this treacherous language. Celan derives a more hopeful view of poetry from his sense of its mode of formal operation. In his Bremen speech he offers an account of the formal way in which the poem reaches out towards another as though it were a message in a bottle.50 Poetry is always dialogic, even when the identity and the very possibility of its addressee are as uncertain as that of the recipient of a bottle that has been sent out to sea. For Celan – like Levinas – it is the act of speaking or sending out which matters, since this is always predicated, however precariously, upon making contact with another. He elaborates on this posited relationship in the Büchner Prize speech: ‘The poem wants to go to another, it needs this other, it needs a counterpart. It seeks it out and speaks to it.’51 This account of the poem’s orientation makes the formal

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possibility of a confessional relation between the speaker and addressee more explicit. The act of poetic utterance, like the act of confession, is validated by the presence of the other to whom it is addressed. While in the earlier Bremen speech the presence of the addressee, despite being a necessary postulation, could scarcely be relied upon, in the later version, the poetic speech act is more actively and insistently engaged in seeking out the other. James K. Lyon writes convincingly about the influence of the ideas of Martin Buber on Paul Celan, characterizing his poetry as dialogue which participates in Buber’s ‘religious quest for a Thou’.52 Leonard Olschner discusses the intersubjective reorientation accomplished by Celan’s poetry as ‘selfencounter’ in the context of his poetic translations.53 Olschner notes the prevalence of themes of remembrance and commemoration in the poetic texts Celan chose to translate and explains how the act of translation itself functions as an anamnesis of the translated poet.54 The dialogic anamnestic relation established in much of Celan’s work is, though, in the light of the poet’s relationship to language and in the context of his writing as a response to the Holocaust, frequently a confessional one. In one of the most memorable models of poetic confession, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ (1798), the mariner confesses to a crime – the killing of an albatross – which he has committed while on a sea voyage, with fatal consequences for the ship’s crew. One of the remarkable things about the text, in relation to the discussion of confession in poetry responding to the Holocaust, is that it makes the relationship between the person confessing and the person hearing that confession explicit. The ancient mariner is the penitent who is compelled repeatedly to confess his sin to unsuspecting listeners. The phrase ‘He cannot choose but hear’, is repeated twice in the poem’s opening stanzas to describe the ancient mariner’s interlocutor, the wedding guest’s, attitude of helpless attention to the bright-eyed mariner. The first incidence of this phrase is shown below: He holds him with his glittering eye – The wedding-guest stood still And listens like a three year’s child; The Marinere hath his will. The wedding-guest sate on a stone, He cannot choose but hear: And thus spake on that ancyent man, The bright-eyed Marinere.55

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The wedding guest’s position of mandated listener forms a secular parallel with that of the confessor administering the Roman Catholic sacrament. The ordained priest has a sacred duty to hear confession when it is asked of him, since he is the conduit between man and God, and does not have the right to refuse any penitent access to that relationship. The sense of a moral obligation to read literary or historical accounts of what happened during the Holocaust is something which has preoccupied literary commentators since Alvin H. Rosenfeld’s relatively early publication on the subject.56 Clearly the reader of poetry written in response to the Holocaust can choose whether or not they hear – or read – it, in the basic sense of deciding whether or not to open a particular book. Having made that decision, however, the reader of such texts may, like the wedding guest, experience a sense of being transfixed by the confessional narrative. Such experience is characteristic of this type of text, in which the expectation of an important revelation or disclosure contributes to its structure. By contrast, Sue Vice has argued that the reader’s prior knowledge of the catastrophic nature of the Holocaust means that traditional narrative features such as suspense do not apply to prose texts of Holocaust fiction, since we already know the fatal outcome for most people in any given story about the Holocaust.57 The interpretation of poetry written in response to the Holocaust as confessional suggests, at the very least, a formal structure of address within which a relationship of mutual attention between the poetic voice and addressee is guaranteed. The ancient mariner accosts his addressee – the hapless wedding guest – and compels him to listen to him. Celan advocates a similar relationship in his Bremen speech, whereby the poetic voice must itself seek out and bespeak its listener. Considerable critical attention has been devoted to Celan’s treatment of other Christian events such as the Resurrection and the Eucharist. Confession is more than just another religious theme in his work, however, since it gives structure to poems which are not even explicitly concerned with religious material. The title of Celan’s third published volume of poetry of 1959, Sprachgitter, alludes among other things to the grille of the confessional booth which separates confessor and penitent. The first line of the title poem, in which eyes are seen between bars, as though through a grating, reinforces this idea: ‘Eyeround between the bars’.58 Celan describes in correspondence how the word ‘Sprachgitter’ signifies for him the extreme difficulty of all forms of linguistic communication with another person.59 The Roman

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Catholic sacrament in which the penitent voices his sins to a priest, through the grille, is just one such instance of laboured communication. Nicholas J. Meyerhofer concludes his analysis of Celan’s ‘Meridian’ speech with a quotation from Celan in conversation with Hugo Huppert in December 1966: I stand on a level of time and space different from that of my reader; he can only understand me ‘at a distance’, he cannot quite lay hold of me, since he is forced always to grasp the bars which separate us … But this look exchanged through bars, this ‘distanced understanding’ is in itself conciliatory, is in itself gain, consolation, and perhaps hope.60 The confessional relation in which one party is speaking ‘through the bars’ to another who is largely silent and – to return to Coleridge – ‘cannot choose but hear’, makes intelligible the relationship between the narrative voice and the barely heard or seen addressee, ‘du’ or ‘you’, which characterizes much of Celan’s work. In so many of his poems, the poetic voice addresses a silent other in what Michael Hamburger has described as a ‘groping towards religious and social communion’.61 The identity of Celan’s unknown but ‘addressable you’ merits consideration. Unlike sacramental confession, in which the ordained confessor represents God, since ultimately only God is capable of conferring absolution on the penitent, Celan’s words are rarely confessed to God. In spite of Celan’s extensive use of religious imagery, God is frequently maimed, powerless or simply absent in his poetry. If God was ever there in the first place, after the Holocaust He becomes, literally, No One, as in the opening lines of the poem ‘Psalm’ from Die Niemandsrose: No one kneads us again from earth and clay, no one talks over our dust. No one. Hallowed be thy name, No one.62 So for Celan there is often no God to whom to make confession, just a forlorn ‘you’. Reflecting on the differences between the dialogic encounters posited by Martin Buber and Celan, Lyon writes: ‘For Buber, God’s presence is indisputable; in Celan’s world the only hope for determining whether such a partner exists at all lies in the encounter

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set up by poetic language’.63 This view helps to illuminate the special significance of pronouns within Celan’s work. The second person addressee is frequently someone who has been murdered in the Holocaust, suggesting that Celan’s principal addressees ‘cannot choose but hear’ because they are all dead. This is a deliberate distortion of the sacramental understanding of confession, which nonetheless relies upon a confessional structure of address for its intelligibility. Geoffrey Hartman describes Celan’s poetic language as a ‘totally nonconfessional language of witness’ because of the progressive lack of grammatical orientation that it affords.64 Hartman is referring to the kind of ‘reckless confessional mode’ of the literary genre of confessional poetry which Hill explicitly rejects and which is clearly also not applicable to Celan’s poetic style. Yet the absence of pronouns in some of Celan’s poetic texts does not preclude the hypothetical presence of his postulated addressee, the ‘addressable you’, in relation to whom there remains, however remotely, the prospect of a confessional address. The confessional relationship in his poetry reflects Celan’s conviction that all communication after the Holocaust is almost impossible and, when it occurs, bound to be distorted, as if spoken through a grille. Celan’s poem, ‘Unten’ (‘Underneath’), from Sprachgitter, exemplifies many of these features: Brought home into forgetting the guest-conversation of our slow eyes. Brought home syllable by syllable, spread onto the day-blind dice, for which the playing hand reaches, great, in awakening. And the too much of my words: taken up to the little crystal in the garb of your silence.65 The poem’s opening line is like a reversal of the traditional idea of confession, leading into forgetting, rather than remembrance. Olschner compares the opening lines of ‘Underneath’ with a passage from Celan’s contemporaneous translation of a poem by Osip Mandelstam, ‘Das Wort bleibt ungesagt’ (‘The Word Remains Unsaid’), as ‘two variations or paraphrases of a single movement (or withdrawal) of language from explicit articulation, with the initially significant distinction that Mandelstam’s text thematizes poetic speech, whereas

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Celan’s only implies it in Rede’.66 In ‘Underneath’, the fact that it is the eyes of the speaker and addressee which are in conversation with one another suggests the setting of the confessional, where the confessor and penitent only see fragments of each other’s faces through the grille. The speech which emerges awkwardly, syllable by syllable, in the second stanza is then revealed to be too much in the final stanza, which describes a confessional relationship between the speaker and addressee, in which one speaks into the other’s silence. The listener, the ‘you’, absorbs the words into a little crystal. The reference to the crystal is another link to the ‘Gitter’ or grille of the volume’s title, since the German word also denotes crystalline lattice structures in geology or chemistry. Finally, the addressee wears their silence as a ‘Tracht’ or costume. The garb or uniform of silence at least implies that the addressee is invested with the authority to listen. The result of Celan’s poem is that too many words are transformed into silence or forgetting. For Celan, poetic communication, including confession, contends with ‘a strong inclination towards silence’;67 it emerges from silence and then returns to it again. Celan and Hill write about confession in their poetry: they write about the multiple subjects for confession derived from the guilt of human existence in the context of recent history, about confession as a failed institution of remembrance, and about the relationship of address between penitent and confessor. At the same time their poetry is itself a kind of confession, which does confession only to undo it again. The poetic texts perform confession in the manner of the sacramental understanding of this as a ritual act of Christian remembrance, derived from ideas about guilt, repentance and atonement in the Hebrew Bible, and they undo the confessional relation by exposing the inadequacy of the ritual form and the theological address upon which it is predicated after the Holocaust. This distortion of the Judaeo-Christian mode of confession foregrounds the unavailability of absolution after the Holocaust. Through the dialogic aspect of this performance the addressee is enjoined in remembrance and participates in the disconsolate acts of confession. The performative and participatory quality of Celan’s and Hill’s poetry as confession, enacting an intersubjective reorientation of the ‘I’ of the poetic voice in relation to the ‘you’ being addressed, according to Levinas’s sense of the ethical function of saying, is one of the ways in which their poetry attends to the ethical and aesthetic responsibilities of remembering the ‘speechless dead’.68 These qualities are derived from the particular operation of their poetry which Celan,

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in his ‘Meridian’ speech, describes as an ‘Atemwende’ or ‘breath-turn’: ‘Poetry: that can mean a breath-turn.’69 This formulation illuminates the paradoxically non-confessional confessional relation in both his and Hill’s poetry. The ‘Atemwende’ refers to the poetic negotiation between voicing and voicelessness, between speech and silence. Although, as Olschner notes, there is a critical danger of overextending Celan’s own poetological categories so that they are obliged to bear too many interpretative meanings and thereby become less meaningful,70 various existing accounts of the ‘Atemwende’ in relation to Celan’s work point towards its possible confessional context. Felman identitifes it with ‘the risky unpredictability of the endeavor of the witness, who does not master – and does not possess – his testimony’.71 Harold Schweizer terms it ‘a counter-speaking, or a speaking that encounters its own speechlessness’.72 According to these interpretations, the ‘Atemwende’ is the poetic moment upon which action and linguistic participation are hinged. Meyerhofer suggests how the ‘Atemwende’ might be thematically connected with what I have outlined as the historical motivations for confession in Celan’s work. He explains that, through its connection with ‘the air we breathe’ containing the ashes of Jews murdered during the Holocaust, the concept of ‘Atemwende’ additionally embodies Celan’s ‘solidarity and … sense of identity with the Jewish dead’ and thence ‘a continual sensitivity to their memory’.73 The ‘Atemwende’ signifies the constitutive interruption of confession as a potentially hesitant speech-act of self-examination and emphasizes the significance of the event of poetic saying beyond what is said. Celan’s account of poetry as an ‘Atemwende’ is a recurring point of reference in Hill’s The Orchards of Syon. The word ‘Atemwende’ is repeated six times throughout the poem, in five different stanzas. Hill, acknowledging that it ‘beggars translation’,74 nonetheless offers seven possible versions of the term in English: ‘last gasp’, ‘breath-hitch’, ‘catch-breath’, ‘breath-ply’, ‘breath-fetch’, ‘turn of breath’ and ‘breathglitch’.75 The hyphenation involved in five of these possibilities visibly acknowledges the difficulty of rendering the term in English, while also effectively carrying some of the burden of rendering that meaning by signifying both the hesitation and the turn which ‘Atemwende’ conveys in German. In addition, the hyphen is a kind of typographical action, which, as in its use in the final section of Celan’s ‘Stimmen’ (‘Voices’), after the key announcement of ‘No / Voices –’, makes the activity of voicelessness apparent on the page.76 Speechlessness or aphasia is a component of poetry’s act of confession and Hill makes

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clear that verbal confession is not always adequate to the expression of contrition within the sacrament of penance: ‘Penitence can be spoken of, it is said, / but is itself beyond words’.77 These lines express Hill’s sense that the penitential remembrance which is owed to the victims of historical suffering, including those who suffered and died in the Holocaust, will always remain beyond the resources of linguistic expression. This knowledge of the necessary failure of language to meet its memorial obligations forms part of the poetic endeavour to respond to those obligations, and is expressed through the disconsolate confessional address in their texts. Celan’s neologism additionally embodies what Hill describes as the characteristics of great poetry, ‘in which the language seems able to hover above itself in a kind of brooding, contemplative, self-rectifying way’.78 This contemplative moment in which language, conscious of its inadequacy, postpones its own utterance, and in which the reader potentially participates as the addressee in the confessional dialogue, is the confessional turn of the ‘Atemwende’. Tenebrae The first obvious connection between the work of Celan and Hill occurs with the publication of Hill’s fourth volume of poetry, Tenebrae, in 1978. Tenebrae includes free translations of two poems by Celan taken from his Die Niemandsrose (1963), ‘Eis, Eden’ and ‘Kermorvan’. E.M. Knottenbelt considers these to be a ‘double elegy’ for Celan.79 The title of Hill’s volume, and one of the poems in it, is also the title of a poem, ‘Tenebrae’, by Celan in Sprachgitter (1959). Another reference to Tenebrae occurs in Celan’s poem ‘Benedicta’ in Die Niemandsrose, whose third stanza reads: ‘Blessed: You, who greeted them, / the tenebrae lights’.80 Tenebrae is the Latin term for ‘darkness’ as well as the name for the offices of matins and lauds said by Christian priests during Holy Week which may be incorporated into public church services.81 The term is taken from the Latin version of the verse in the Gospel of Matthew describing the passage of time during Jesus’ crucifixion: ‘Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour’ (27: 45). The Tenebrae service is conceived of as a funeral service for Christ, which both anticipates and remembers the crucifixion, as participants are consumed by grief and lamentation. As at most other festivals, the Tenebrae matins is divided in the breviary into three periods of nocturnal prayer known as ‘nocturns’. Each nocturn comprises three psalms and three lessons,

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which may be taken from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, Saint Augustine’s commentary on the psalms, or New Testament texts. The lauds during Tenebrae retain something of their customary anticipatory quality, looking forward to the dawn, although the Miserere (Psalm 51) is substituted for more joyous psalms and the antiphons which precede and succeed each psalm are full of mourning.82 The Tenebrae psalms establish a connection with penitence, confession and remembrance which is significant for my consideration of Celan’s and Hill’s poems. Of the group of seven penitential psalms (6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, 143), three – numbers 38, 51 and 143 – are habitually used in the Tenebrae services.83 Michael Travers describes how, in Christian tradition, the penitential psalms, which are also referred to as the psalms of confession, help believers to confess their sins to God and to seek forgiveness.84 Hill’s long poem The Orchards of Syon contains three explicit references to the penitential psalms: a passing reference in the fortieth stanza; a simile in stanza forty-four involving the sequence of prints by the French artist Georges Rouault entitled Miserere, after Psalm 51; and a longer reference in the sixtyfirst stanza: ‘Good to hear / the seven Hebrew-Latin Penitential Psalms, / after some lapse, claim for despair a status, / something I cannot do’.85 Hill’s reference here might be to Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, when all seven psalms are used in the Anglican liturgy: the first three are recited at matins, the Miserere at the Commination or collective act of confession, and the last three at evensong.86 All seven psalms embody Old Testament ideas about human sin and divine forgiveness of sin, made possible through the act of confessional remembrance, which anticipate Christian thinking about the sacrament of penance. Hill’s recognition that the penitential psalms ‘claim for despair a status’ which he cannot points to the Judaeo-Christian associations between penitence and absolution which many of his poetic texts contest. Arnold Stadler characterizes Celan’s engagement with the psalms as one which challenges their theological stance without paying attention to their formal, poetic construction.87 In what follows I will show how, on the contrary, a formal attention to the way in which language and rhythm is used in the psalms is integral to Celan’s – and Hill’s – engagement with them. This type of consideration is inseparable from their thematic encounter with the psalms, including the way in which they are invested with Holocaust remembrance, since the meaning of poetic speech is always also a matter of its formal linguistic characteristics. This is evident in the texts of all their poems which make connections with the psalms. It is no coincidence that

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Hill’s long poem, The Triumph of Love, in which his answer to the forlorn question, ‘What remains?’ is ‘the Psalms – they remain’,88 is composed of 150 stanzas, the same as the number of psalms in the Psalter. Celan’s Sprachgitter is divided into five cycles of poems and closes with a long poem ‘Engführung’ (‘Straitening’), which stands on its own outside the cyclic structure, and brings together motifs from the rest of the volume. ‘Tenebrae’, which opens the third cycle of poems, can be read as a bitter parody of the voices raised in psalmic prayer during the Christian remembrance service. John Felstiner describes how in ‘Tenebrae’ Celan ‘sets that somber office of Holy Week above his own verses depicting the Jews’ excruciating death’.89 The full text of the poem is here: Nah sind wir, Herr, nahe und greifbar. Gegriffen schon, Herr, ineinander verkrallt, als wär der Leib eines jeden von uns dein Leib, Herr. Bete, Herr, bete zu uns, wir sind nah. Windschief gingen wir hin, gingen wir hin, uns zu bücken nach Mulde und Maar. Zur Tränke gingen wir, Herr. Es war Blut, es war, was du vergossen, Herr. Es glänzte. Es warf uns dein Bild in die Augen, Herr. Augen und Mund stehen so offen und leer, Herr. Wir haben getrunken, Herr. Das Blut und das Bild, das im Blut war, Herr. Bete Herr. Wir sind nah.90 In contrast to Celan’s ‘Psalm’, this poem is addressed to God as though in prayer and yet in the third and the final stanzas, God is commanded to pray to those speaking in the poem. ‘Herr’, the German term for ‘Lord’, is the most frequently used term of address to God throughout

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the psalms in German and since the Tenebrae services during Holy Week are primarily comprised of psalms – each contains fifteen psalms – there can be no doubt as to their significance within the poem. ‘Tenebrae’ can be read as a reversal of the psalmic relations of intercessor and object of remembrance in the Tenebrae service. In the Christian service, worshippers address God – largely through Old Testament texts – on behalf of His dead son, Jesus. In Celan’s poem, it is the dead who speak the address to God on their own behalf. The dead are numerous and represented as such by the first person plural pronoun, ‘wir’ (‘we’), which is also used in some of the psalms. The frequency with which ‘wir’ and ‘uns’ (‘us’) are repeated helps to generate a more powerful sense of urgency than would be feasible from a single intercessor, suggesting that the poetic voice is not a single individual representing many others, but that of a multitude of dead speaking in chorus. The communal address is a distorted echo of the collective recital of prayers of confession during the Tenebrae service. The dead in this poem are Jews murdered in the Holocaust, who have appropriated the most solemn service of mournful remembrance in the Christian calendar through which to call themselves into God’s remembrance. The psalmists frequently appeal for God’s remembrance; the third penitential psalm which is used during Tenebrae for Good Friday, Psalm 38, is called ‘A Psalm of David, to bring to remembrance’. Death is dreaded in the psalms as the conclusive sign of having been forgotten and abandoned by God. In Old Testament Jewish belief there is no heavenly afterlife, just a twilight netherworld from which God is absent.91 Hence proximity to God was particularly important during life, and the psalms are full of instances in which the psalmists measure their suffering in terms of separation from God and pray that they might be brought near to Him again.92 Stadler remarks on the wellknown congruity between the first line of Celan’s ‘Tenebrae’ and that of Hölderlin’s ‘Patmos’: ‘Nah ist, und schwer zu fassen, der Gott.’ (‘Near is / God and difficult to grasp.’) He points to a shared reference in these lines to Psalm 145: 18: ‘The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth.’ Stadler suggests that Celan’s reversal of the Biblical meaning is a consequence of his poetic technique of paradoxical expression rather than a blasphemous challenge to God.93 I would agree with Rosenfeld that this is a literary ‘repudiation’ by Celan of Hölderlin’s poem and the wider religious meaning.94 In Celan’s poem, the nearness of the speakers to God is meant to be threatening and ‘Nah’ (‘near’) is the first and last word of the poem. It is one of four monosyllabic words which are repeated in

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reverse sequence at the beginning and end of the poetic text which opens, ‘Nah sind wir, Herr,’ (‘Near are we, Lord’) and closes with, ‘Herr. / Wir sind nah.’ (‘Lord. / We are near.’) In the Tenebrae service, short verses known as antiphons are recited before and after each psalm. These are adapted from a significant passage of the psalmic text and are supposed to focus worshippers’ attention on the most fitting interpretation of the psalm’s meaning for the context of Christian remembrance.95 The first and last lines of Celan’s poem perform an antiphonal function in terms of the distillation of crucial meaning: the dead are near and they are speaking to God. Celan’s unquiet dead are also disquieted. They are not in a distant, ethereal resting place, but ‘near and at hand’. Hill’s ‘September Song’, subtitled ‘born 19.6.32 – deported 24.9.42’, has a similar phrase running from the first line into the second: ‘untouchable / you were not’.96 The uneasy register of Celan’s opening stanza becomes one of abject terror by the second stanza in which the speakers reveal that they are Gegriffen schon, Herr, ineinander verkrallt, als wär der Leib eines jeden von uns dein Leib, Herr. These lines bring to mind the horrific contortions of the human corpses piled up in the concentration and death camps. Comparable images of physical suffering occur in the third penitential psalm used in Tenebrae for Good Friday (Ps. 38: 2, 5–8), but the crucial difference between Celan’s poem and the psalm is that, in accordance with Old Testament custom, the psalmist believes his sufferings are the deserved consequences of his past sin, whereas the sufferings of the Jewish victims in the Holocaust are manifestly unjust and unjustifiable. This fatal disparity is emphasized in the final two lines of this stanza, in which the appalling meaning is overlaid by a mocking tone which was established in the rhythm of the first line. The stresses of the first lines of the first and second stanzas are similar, falling on the first and fourth syllables of, ‘Nah sind wir, Herr’, and on the second and fifth of ‘Gegriffen schon, Herr’, where the first syllable ‘Ge-’ is almost elided in order to echo the rhythm of the poem’s opening line. The rhythmic echo is intended to provoke the poem’s divine addressee, whose name is given particular emphasis in these lines by means of the caesura preceding His name in each case.

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Whereas the psalmists whose words are heard in the Tenebrae service are, even in the complaint psalms, subject to God’s will, the accusatory speakers in Celan’s poem seek to make God compliant with their will. The taunting, irreverent tone of those parts of the second stanza which refer to God contrasts with the tone of appalled respect which is reserved for the reference to suffering Jewish bodies. The jeering tone is established by means of the balance between caesura and enjambment in the two final lines of the stanza, so that the words stop and run on unexpectedly to create an irregular rhythm which is unlike the measured, short phrases of popular Christian prayers such as the ‘Our Father’ and also unlike the more lyrical construction of many of the psalms. The stresses of the last two lines emphasize their sceptical content, culminating in the final line in which all three words are stressed: ‘dein Leib, Herr’. There is a particular emphasis on ‘Herr’ created by the familiar means of the caesura before God’s name is pronounced. The speakers suggest that each of their tortured bodies is identical with the body of God, establishing a connection with the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist. The Jewish speakers address the Christian God, but without the faith of either the psalmists or the Christians. In the context of the Tenebrae service invoked by the poem’s title, the implication here is that the Jews who suffered and died in the Holocaust and who are interceding for their own remembrance in the poem, share in the bodily suffering undergone by the Son of man – God made flesh – on the cross, whose death is remembered by Christian worshippers during Tenebrae and in the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist. Occasions of ritual Christian remembrance become occasions for Jewish remembrance. The poem asks how the suffering body of Jesus may be remembered without also remembering the countless suffering bodies of the murdered Jews. These dead have experienced their own resurrection, enabling them to speak in the poem, but one far removed from the glorious resurrection of Christ. Their return is all too painfully embodied in the terms of ongoing physical suffering described in the second stanza; their haunting is to command an unfulfilled duty of prayerful remembrance which is articulated in the request contained in the third stanza that God pray to them. The third stanza asks not that God pray for the dead, but that He pray to them. In both the second and third stanzas, the speaking dead address God in order to effect a substitution with Him. Unlike the suffering recorded in the psalms of the Tenebrae service, the suffering of the Jewish dead in the Holocaust will not be alleviated by any action of God’s except His supplication to them.

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The remainder of the poem develops the connection with the Eucharist as the speakers drink from a trough which contains God’s blood. The word ‘vergossen’ (‘shed‘) which occurs here is used in the three Gospel accounts of the institution of the Eucharist: ‘Denn dies ist mein Blut des Bundes, das für viele vergossen wird zur Vergebung der Sünden’ (‘for this is my blood of the new testament which is shed for many for the remission of sins’) (Matt. 26: 28; also Mark 14: 24; Luke 22: 20). The glistening blood reflects God’s image back at the speakers and they drink up the image along with the blood. The speakers do not drink the blood willingly. They drink humiliatingly from a trough and, following on from their experience of being painfully crushed together, they are bowed and desperate. The consumption of blood contravenes the Jewish dietary laws but there is no other option for the dead to assuage their raging thirst. One of the psalms used in the Tenebrae services rejects sacrificial offerings of blood as inappropriate forms of devotion to the Old Testament God (Ps. 16:4). Having identified with the Christian God’s body in the earlier stanza, the dead now complete the reluctant act of communion by drinking His blood. The ‘sacrament’ is complete and all that remains is the enjoinder for God to pray to the speakers in the final stanza. Reference should be made here to the most extensive published interpretation of Celan’s poem in the context of the Tenebrae service to date, in an essay by Hans-Georg Gadamer. While Gadamer is right to emphasize the connections between Celan’s text and the Christian service, his analysis fails sufficiently to acknowledge the Jewish perspective in the poem. His question about whether the poem prompts us to think of the Jewish suffering and death in Hitler’s extermination camps is posed in passing and does not receive the emphatically affirmative answer which I think is due.97 Gadamer does not take account of the numerous ways in which the poem alludes to the Holocaust. He proposes that the poem refers not just to the death of Jesus on the cross, but to the death of all people.98 This claim, which extends to his identification of the poem’s speakers with all humanity, elides and excludes the specifically Jewish character of the human suffering and death in the poem. Gadamer interprets the poem’s repeated address to the ‘Herr’ as an appeal to Christ and ignores the Jewish origin of the psalms.99 In Celan’s ‘Tenebrae’, as in the Christian office, Jesus’ sacrificial death is remembered by means of a confessional appeal to God derived from the penitential psalms. In the poem, Christian remembrance is contingent upon remembrance of those who died in the Holocaust.

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The poetic text borrows the psalmodic techniques of the repeated invocation of the ‘Herr’ and the antiphon, and subverts common themes of the psalms such as the benefit of proximity to God and the rejection of blood sacrifices, so that remembrance is associated with sacramental qualities which have been perversely distorted in the context of the Holocaust. As Stadler states, ‘In their very repudiation, the psalms participate in the existential actualization of Celan’s poetics.’100 The operation of the poetic version of actualizing remembrance is derived from the textual structure of address which refers to both the penitential psalms and the collective recital of prayers of confession in the Tenebrae service. Whereas in the acts of Christian worship these forms of address enable penitents to seek God’s forgiveness, in Celan’s ‘Tenebrae’ the implication is that it is God who needs to petition for human forgiveness and to make confession of His failure to intervene during the Holocaust. As in ‘Unten’, a deformed version of the traditional confessional relationship is established between speaker(s) and addressee. While the confessional poetic address establishes a possibility of remembering suffering during the Holocaust and seeks to make that suffering matter again in the present, it does so partly by calling into question the value of the confessional relation after the Holocaust, in the context of an impotent God who failed to prevent Jewish suffering. The poetic demonstration of the failure of the traditional confessional address is part of the literary response to the duty of remembering the dead, which involves articulating the knowledge that available linguistic resources, including those represented by Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance, will never be sufficient for the fulfilment of that duty. The possibilities for sacramental remembrance are also extended beyond the confessional recitation of the psalms and lessons, by means of the dysfunctional Eucharistic ritual which is described. Here, remembrance also extends to the Jewish dead who intercede on their own behalf. Celan’s ‘Tenebrae’ suggests that the darkness which overcame the world as Jesus was dying on the cross was not unique, and presents the darkness of Jewish deaths during the Holocaust. It asks about the nature of the relationship between the death and suffering of millions of Jews, and the death and suffering of the single Jew who became the Christian messiah. It is a more specifically contextualized re-positing of Job’s fundamental question about the existence of evil in a divinely created universe, a question which also appears in one of the psalms recited in the Tenebrae service on Good Friday evening (Ps. 92: 7). Celan’s version of the question is more

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specific because it identifies both particular suffering – the Jews during the Holocaust – and particular divinity – Christ on the cross – and thus brings to bear a political dimension upon Job’s eternal moral question, namely, the extent of Christian responsibility for the defining evil of the twentieth century. Geoffrey Hill’s poem, ‘Tenebrae’, is the last in his Tenebrae volume.101 It is a much longer poem than Celan’s, its eight stanzas including two complete sonnets as the second and fifth stanzas. Hill’s poem is also concerned with the death of Christ in the context of remembrance of the Tenebrae service. In an interview following his award of the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for Tenebrae, Hill discusses the associations of the Christian service and its relationship to his poetry in terms which are relevant to my idea of his poetry as confession: Tenebrae [sic102] is a ritual, and like all rituals it obviously helps one to deal with and express states which in that particular season of the church’s year are appropriate – suffering and gloom. Tenebrae does at one level mean darkness or shadow; but at another important level it clearly indicates a ritualistic, formal treatment of suffering, anxiety and pain.103 Vincent Sherry describes Hill’s poem as a ‘series of devotional and liturgical lyrics’ which explores ‘suffering human isolation and estrangement from the divine’.104 Given that the poem shares a title with Celan’s poem, and occurs in a volume in which Hill translates two texts by Celan, its engagement with and estrangement from the Christian faith must necessarily be seen as cognizant of the postHolocaust theological context. The voices in Hill’s ‘Tenebrae’ reinterpret the Christian penitential ritual; their confession is partly a confession of an inability, after the Holocaust, straightforwardly to confess the Christian faith. The damaged theological relation evident in the confessional address in Hill’s text establishes an alternative communicative possibility in which the alienated divine addressee is substituted for a human one. The suffering of the speaker in Hill’s second stanza results from their apparent bondage to an unnamed lover, whose Christian identity gradually emerges. The opening quatrain describes the initially redemptive relationship between speaker and lover: And you, who with your soft and searching voice drew me out of the sleep where I was lost,

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who held me near your heart that I might rest confiding in the darkness of your choice.105 The tone here is tender, with the string of predominantly monosyllabic words of the first three lines suggesting easy communication and reflecting the comfort afforded to the speaker at the beginning of this loving relationship. The speaker has been rescued from a disorientating sleep and transferred to a place of safety, ‘near your heart’, which, like the psalmists’ concept of refuge that was subverted by Celan in his ‘Tenebrae’, is measured in terms of closeness to God. In the fourth line, however, a note of qualification is introduced with the translation of the Latin title word, revealing that the resting place near to the beloved does not offer light, but darkness conferred by him. This prefigures the sinister tone in which the relationship of elective bondage is described in the second quatrain. This tone is established by the sibilant sounds of the opening word, ‘possessed’: possessed by you I chose to have no choice, fulfilled in you I sought no further quest. You keep me, now, in dread that quenches trust, in desolation where my sins rejoice. The word ‘fulfilled’, like ‘possessed’, has a repeated consonant sound in which its meaning appears to be inscribed. The two double ‘s’s of ‘possessed’ reflect one another, and the repeated alternate ‘f ’ and ‘l’ sounds of ‘fulfilled’ resolve into one another, like the actions which the words describe. Both words emphasize the hermetic relationship between the speaker and addressee. In the state of bondage in which the speaker finds themselves, the only relief from the prevailing desolation is in sinfulness. The paradoxical phrase, ‘sins rejoice’, anticipates the sado-masochistic nature of the relationship which is outlined in the sestet: As I am passionate so you with pain turn my desire; as you seem passionless so I recoil from all that I would gain, wounding myself upon forgetfulness, false ecstasies, which you in truth sustain as you sustain each item of your cross. The speaker’s passion is met with pain, and the addressee’s indifference causes the speaker to injure themselves, the resulting wounds inducing

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a state of ecstasy in a sado-masochistic cycle in which sexual pleasure and pain overlap. The final line contains the definitive proof of the revelation which has been hinted at throughout in the words ‘your cross’. The poem’s addressee is Jesus Christ. As with Celan’s poem, the address here is a distorted version of the psalmists’ addresses to God which form part of the Tenebrae services. Like the psalmists, the speaker in Hill’s ‘Tenebrae’ is in awe of God, but unlike them, proximity to God does not afford any sense of liberation. Neither is there any of that trust between God and the poem’s speaker which so imbues the psalms, since the speaker has embarked upon a slavish, sexualized relationship to God which deprives them of free will. Most strikingly, in the second quatrain, the speaker’s close relationship with God finds expression in sinfulness which is generally abhorred as the reason for the psalmists’ separation from God. While the psalms in general provide Jewish and Christian worshippers with poetic textual forms for confessing their faith in God, the penitential psalms, some of which are used in the Tenebrae service, are one of numerous possible contexts for the confession of sin within these faiths. The versions of the psalmic confessional address in Celan’s and Hill’s ‘Tenebrae’ poems are made after the Holocaust and therefore exclude traditional conceptions of faith and any attendant prospect of absolution. The third stanza of Hill’s ‘Tenebrae’ continues the subversion of ideal Christian relationships in its presentation of different senses of the current impossibility of making a confession of faith: Veni Redemptor, but not in our time. Christus Resurgens, quite out of this world. ‘Ave’ we cry; the echoes are returned. Amor Carnarlis is our dwelling place.106 The stanza’s opening line quotes from the hymn composed by St Ambrose of Milan, ‘Veni, redemptor gentium’. Hill substitutes the final word of the Latin with ‘but not in our time’, words which oppose the Latin meaning, effectively denying the practical possibility of earthly redemption. A similar process of Latin invocation and subsequent denial in English is repeated in the three following lines. The ‘Ave’ of the third line is an abbreviation of ‘Ave Maria’, the greeting given by the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary in the description of the annunciation in Luke’s Gospel (1: 28). ‘Ave Maria’ is used as a devotional recitation, but in Hill’s poem the speakers’ devotions are

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echoed back to them. McNees describes how ‘Hill views prayer as twisting back on itself unanswered’.107 Sherry posits this stanza’s rejection of the ‘incarnational myth’ in terms which evoke postHolocaust Judaeo-Christian theology, cataloguing the ‘delayed’ Messiah, ‘hidden God’ and devotional cries which ‘go nowhere’, and arguing that ‘Tenebrae’ is also a call for a new version of moral redemption residing in poetry itself.108 The stanza’s final line refers back to the preceding sonnet in which the relationship between the worshipper and Christ is figured in unfruitful physical terms. ‘Amor Carnarlis’ was often contrasted by medieval thinkers with the more proper Christian attitude of caritas, although Hill’s ‘Funeral Music’, written for English noblemen executed in the fifteenth century, is sceptical of caritas as a genuine Christian motivation: ‘we are dying / To satisfy fat Caritas’.109 Christopher Ricks quotes Hill on this fraught inter-relationship: ‘Many of the poems in Tenebrae are concerned with the strange likeness and ultimate unlikeness of sacred and profane love’.110 In the third stanza of ‘Tenebrae’, carnal love is the earthly compromise which must be acceded to after the rejection of any prospects of spiritual redemption, resurrection and devotion. There is some consolation to be gleaned from God’s absence, however. Sherry interprets the theological doubt in ‘Tenebrae’ as an opportunity for human endeavour, specifically via the poetic commitment to and within the ‘active life’ of language, to create new possibilities for ethically responsible relationships.111 The unresponsive divinity in the third stanza of ‘Tenebrae’ may be replaced by a human addressee, establishing the prospect of a new orientation of the poetic voice. Post-Holocaust religious uncertainty thus potentially generates the possibility for intersubjective ethical relationships instantiated in acts of poetic saying, in what Levinas describes in his essay on Celan as ‘A seeking, dedicating itself to the other in the form of the poem’.112 While the Christian confession of faith after the Holocaust is untenable, for the various reasons suggested here, the possibility at least remains – via the reconfiguration of the structure of address in the failed act of confession in relation to a human subject – for articulating something of what has been lost, and thereby taking on some measure of responsibility for that loss. Religious scepticism prevails throughout much of the remainder of the poem, although with different inflections and to varying degrees according to the different arrangement of each stanza. The fourth stanza is addressed to God and opens with a line which sounds like one from a simple children’s prayer or song: ‘O light of light, supreme

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delight’. In accordance with its lilting form, this verse is more brightly hopeful than almost any other, ending with a comment on the value of the Tenebrae service for Christian believers: ‘our faith is in our festivals’. Sherry links this stanza back to the psalmic context of the Tenebrae service in his characterization of its various alliterative repetitions as ‘a sort of antiphonal formula’.113 The subsequent fifth stanza resumes the sonnet form and can be read as a reply to the second stanza, whose rhyme scheme it echoes. The poetic voice here is that of a frustrated male who wants to be rid of a clinging lover and thus is possibly that of Jesus eschewing the slavish devotion offered to him in the earlier sonnet. After four stanzas in which the poetic voice has spoken either in the singular or collective first person, the next two stanzas resume the more objective third person address of the opening stanza. The sixth and seventh stanzas are both lists of attributions, describing first the crucifixion which is remembered during Tenebrae, and then the figure of Jesus on the cross. Hill’s ‘Tenebrae’ strikes a variety of postures in relation to the Tenebrae service of Christian remembrance. McNees discusses ‘Tenebrae’ as part of an ‘ambivalent quest for faith’.114 Much longer than Celan’s poem of the same name, it has space to explore a wider range of attitudes to Christ’s passion, including incredulity, simple trust, and sexual devotion and bondage. The Holocaust, which is central to Celan’s poem, does not form a conspicuous part of Hill’s ‘Tenebrae’, but part of the context for its religious scepticism is clearly the theological uncertainty of post-Holocaust Judaeo-Christianity. Although it is less radically altered than that in Celan’s ‘Tenebrae’, the expression of faith in Hill’s poem is far from straightforward. When the poetic voice is close to God, as in the second stanza, devotion – even if it is not reversed like Celan’s ‘Tenebrae’ – is severely distorted. Wainwright expands on the relationship between what he terms the ‘great explanatory power’ of religion115 and Hill’s poetic form: ‘None of the meanings or “truths” which might render this world orderly that are inspected in Tenebrae – not sexual love, or religion, which in any case fall upon each other, not England in its redolent and resonating nationhood, nor the transcendence of the martyr – none of these can escape the debilitating styles of their expressions.’116 Wainwright’s analysis applies equally to the single poem, ‘Tenebrae’, which serves as a microcosm of the volume as a whole. The various poetic styles which Hill explores in successive stanzas of the poem – sonnet, song, list, paean – are all set against the predominantly psalmic context of the Tenebrae service. Psalms,

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whatever else they may do, always act as confessions of faith, in which the psalmist strives to express the overwhelming strength of his belief in God. The dominant impulse in the psalms is that of confession of belief in God. In the flawed but sensuous accounts of Christian relations in Hill’s poem, none of the voices articulate such depths of faith. Even Hill’s fourth stanza, which tries to articulate a naïve trust in God, or the sixth stanza, which enumerates interpretations of Christ’s passion, including a number of positive responses, are not without their complications. The expression of faith in Hill’s poem is obviated by the poetic voices themselves which cannot successfully apply themselves to traditional devotional utterance (‘“Ave” we cry; the echoes are returned’) or fulfil the expectations of traditional poetic forms. This, then, is one of the ways in which Hill’s poetry can be said to be confessional. The religious disconsolation which is conveyed in the denial of confessional possibilities in Hill’s poem potentially leads to a heightened awareness of responsibilities towards human subjects, who occupy the position of the estranged divinity in the confessional address. While it is, in Hill’s words, deeply ‘fascinated by the existence of religion as a historical fact, as a power in the lives of men and women’,117 each word in ‘Tenebrae’ is an agonising act of speech which, after the Holocaust, confesses its own inability to confess to the Christian faith in the way the psalmists did. Precisely this nonconfession in relation to a distant and possibly absent God creates the possibility for a confessional encounter in the poetic text with a human addressee of the kind embodied by Celan’s ‘addressable you’, and a corresponding reorientation of intersubjective relationships. Balsam and Gall Poetic references to balsam and gall are frequently associated with ideas about religious faith or faithlessness. Penance is pronounced upon the ancient mariner in Coleridge’s poem by two ethereal spirit voices which speak out of the air: The other was a softer voice, As soft as honey-dew: Quoth he the man hath penance done, And penance more will do.118 The unctuous voice of the second spirit announces the next phase of the mariner’s fate at sea. ‘Honeydew’ can be a general designation for

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‘an ideally sweet or luscious substance’, or a specific term for a sticky liquid secreted by aphids onto the stems and leaves of plants (Oxford English Dictionary). The contrast which is set up here between the sweetness of honeydew and the presumed bitterness of penance is like the formulation adopted by St Augustine in the Confessions to describe the guilt he feels after succumbing to sexual temptation following his arrival in Carthage.119 Describing the Eucharist in an early poem, ‘The Bidden Guest’, Hill shows how its sacramental function contains this bitter-sweet opposition as wounds are ‘Healed by the pouring-in of wine / From bitter as from sweet grapes bled’.120 References to balsam and gall form a rich vein in the work of Celan and Hill. Celan’s interest in botany has been well documented,121 and numerous critical interpretations of his individual poetic texts involve detailed discussion of their botanical references. Hill’s poetry is similarly knowledgeable. In what follows I will explore the connections between the group of words used to designate botanical excretions in their poetry, both sweet and bitter, and how these relate to the act of confessional speech after the Holocaust, in the continuing context of the Tenebrae service. Hartman observes that in Celan’s linguistic response to the Holocaust, ‘The shock given to speech cannot be repaired by art or a natural balm’.122 I will show how references to balsam and gall in Celan’s poetic texts indeed do not provide linguistic reparation, but work to sustain the confessional act of poetic speaking within which that shock – the absence of reparation – can at least be registered. As for Coleridge’s ancient mariner, the bitter penance of remembrance in Celan’s and Hill’s poetry is constituted by the ongoing acts of confessional address themselves, in the absence of any subsequent expectation of soothing consolation. Concern about speaking and voices – or Levinas’s ‘saying’ – is the subject of the first poem in Celan’s Sprachgitter, the volume which contains ‘Tenebrae’. ‘Stimmen’ (‘Voices’) is a relatively long piece which constitutes the whole of the first cycle. The first word of the poem, which, in the absence of a separate designation, also becomes its title, is repeated seven times, along with two occurrences of the singular ‘Stimme’ (‘voice’). Successive stanzas are descriptions of and sometimes partly articulations of different voices. The repeated italicization of ‘Stimmen’ which continues throughout the poem, with one exception, visually distinguishes the word from others on the printed page and encourages the reader to pronounce and to hear the word with emphasis. The italic form also means that the word appears as a quotation each time it is used. The word speaks for itself,

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announcing its own significance through its precedence, italicization, repetition, and, of course, its meaning. The first three sets of voices in the poem are rooted in nature but they become progressively more difficult to locate precisely. The opening lines conjure ‘Stimmen, ins Grün / der Wasserfläche geritzt’ (‘Voices, etched into / the green of the water’s surface’).123 The second and third sections evoke ‘Stimmen vom Nesselweg her’ (‘Voices from the nettle path’) and ‘Stimmen, nachtdurchwachsen’ (‘Voices, night-streaked’). In the third section, the voices are a deracinated, spectral presence. The fourth section of the poem describes the effect of the voices on the poem’s addressee: Stimmen, vor denen dein Herz ins Herz deiner Mutter zurückweicht. Stimmen vom Galgenbaum her, wo Spätholz und Frühholz die Ringe tauschen und tauschen.124 The disembodied voices seem to threaten the addressee, who shies away from them into a space of maternal protection. The explanation for this fright comes with the subsequent description of where the voices in this section are originating from, ‘Stimmen vom Galgenbaum her’ (‘Voices from the gallows-tree’). This repetition of ‘Stimmen’ is more condensed than previous references, following only two lines after the occurrence with which the section opens. The absence of italics and the succeeding comma mean that the reader encounters the rest of the words in the line more quickly than in previous usage of the word. The sinister image of the gallows-tree becomes the focus of attention in this line. Arboreal references occur in subsequent sections of the poem, in the reference to the Biblical ark in the sixth section, but most significantly in the final, eighth section, discussed below. Subsequently, in the sixth section, the owner of one of the poem’s voices is named: ‘Jakobsstimme’ (‘Jacob’s voice’).125 Celan is referring to the Old Testament story in Chapter 27 of Genesis in which Jacob betrays his older brother, Esau, by impersonating him before their blind father, Isaac, thereby receiving a blessing which should rightfully have been Esau’s. When Jacob goes to his father, Isaac recognizes the voice of his younger son and is suspicious, even though Jacob’s hands have been covered with goat skin so that they will feel like those of his more hirsute brother. The Biblical text here recounts Isaac’s words: ‘The

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voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau’ (27: 22). Celan’s apostrophe condenses the two words of the Biblical text into a single word: ‘Jakobsstimme’, emphasizing the essential connection between voice and owner which has been lacking in the unidentified voices in the poem so far. Voices, unlike other aspects of the body, cannot be readily disguised. The tonal quality of Jacob’s voice gives his identity away, even though he later uses that same voice to lie about who he is to Isaac. Voices unwittingly perform – or confess – the identity of their owners as well as providing a means of consciously performing deception, the material for confession. In the poem’s final section, the various voices are transformed into no voice, and a particular noise is described which takes their place: Keine Stimme – ein Spätgeräusch, stundenfremd, deinen Gedanken geschenkt, hier, endlich herbeigewacht: ein Fruchtblatt, augengroß, tief geritzt; es harzt, will nicht vernarben.126 The poet describes a noise made by a carpel – one of the reproductive organs of a flower – the size of an eye, with deeply etched markings, which secretes a resinous juice. One such plant resin is myrrh, which comes from a number of plants, including the evergreen shrub, the Arabian myrtle (Balsamodendron myrrha).127 According to Greek mythology, Myrrha, the mother of Adonis, was in love with her own father, and was transformed into a myrtle and destined to shed the bitter tears which we recognize as myrrh. The many punctures which characterize the myrtle leaf are explained in another myth involving unacceptable familial desire, in which Theseus’s wife, Phaedra, awaits the return of her stepson Hippolytus, with whom she is in love, in a myrtle bush, and passes the time by scratching its leaves with a hairpin. According to a Jewish belief in Old Testament times, if myrtle leaves made a crackling noise when held in the hands it meant that the handler’s beloved would be faithful.128 So in Celan’s poem, the voices which have played equivocally throughout are finally absent, replaced by a sound like the crackle of the myrtle leaf, signifying the faithfulness

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of the poem’s addressee. This is a commitment which cannot be voiced, since it ultimately depends upon actions rather than words. It is made known through a noise originating in the natural world, interpreted according to ancient custom. Whereas the often disembodied voices in the poem have resonated without always communicating, or, in the case of Jacob’s voice, stood for deceitful utterance, the last voiceless sound that is ‘endlich / herbeigewacht’ (‘finally / watched for’) embodies the potentially ideal relationship between the poetic voice and the beloved addressee. It gestures towards a fulfilment which is finally unattainable and is destined to be tinged with bitterness, since the myrtle leaf ‘harzt, will nicht / vernarben’ (‘drops resin, will not / scar over’). The renowned healing properties of myrrh will not help to restore the irrevocable loss of the poet’s separation from the beloved, since in the Greek myth the myrrh is itself the symbol of this separation. As a poem about voices, ‘Stimmen’ is also a poem about poetry. Its theme, which is made manifest in its formal arrangement, is the capacity of poetry to perform in different voices and the moral and aesthetic implications of this kind of performance. From the naturally inscribed voices of the first sections, to the potentially murderous voices at the gallows-tree, and the way in which Jacob’s voice works as an identifier which simultaneously deceives its hearer about its identity, the repeated instances of the word ‘Stimmen’, while they describe particular voices, also reflect upon what it means to evoke different voices by drawing attention to their own descriptive qualities. In the final stanza the truth of faithfulness to another does not depend upon a voice for its articulation. Celan recognizes that ultimately the truth about human existence resides beyond words and thus beyond poetry, in our actions towards others, although, paradoxically, such actions may include speech-acts which find their expression in poetry. Poetic speaking needs to be self-conscious about its own failings in order to intimate a possibility of moving beyond those failings. The conception of the poetic address as a desanctified form of confession suggests one way in which the failure of poetic speech may be inscribed within its own act of speaking. Celan’s poem shares the logic of Levinas’s ethical distinction between the act of saying to another and what is said, as well as the awareness of their contradictory interdependency. In his discussion of Celan’s comparison of the poem with a handshake, Levinas considers the relationship between poetic language and non-linguistic communication:

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for Celan the poem is situated precisely at that pre-syntactic and (as is surely de rigueur these days!) pre-logical level, but a level also pre-disclosing: at the moment of pure touching, pure contact, grasping, squeezing – which is, perhaps, a way of giving, right up to and including the hand that gives. A language of proximity for proximity’s sake, older than that of ‘the truth of being’ – which it probably carries and sustains – the first of the languages, response preceding the question, responsibility for the neighbour, by its for the other, the whole marvel of giving.129 Celan strives to create the conditions of voicelessness – the ‘Atemwende’ – through which poetry might express that truth which, as we have seen in ‘Stimmen’, depends upon the initial evocation of voices, so that the significance of their absence is more fully understood. It is in the poetic voices in Celan’s and Hill’s poetry that the confessional mode is articulated; in ‘Stimmen’ what remains after the voices have ceased are the sounds of nature which, as the traditional Jewish interpretation of the crackle of the myrtle leaf suggests, can convey a more careful truthfulness. A possible reference to the myrtle occurs in the sixth poem of the first sequence in Geoffrey Hill’s Tenebrae, ‘The Pentecost Castle’. The sequence comprises fifteen poems which partly retell the story of Christ’s passion in what Hill terms ‘a hinted drama’.130 Hill describes an inaccessible place, where the wild balsam stirs by the little stream the rocks the high rocks are brimming with flowers there love grows and there love rests and is saved.131 This reference to a place where ‘wild balsam’ grows and where love ‘rests and is saved’ could be alluding to the same belief about the ability of myrtle leaves to sound enduring, patiently waiting love that Celan describes in the final section of ‘Stimmen’, although the love in Hill’s poem is Christian as well as romantic. The reference to balsam extends the poem’s frame of reference to the Old Testament, where there are numerous occurrences of the word as ‘a common name for many of those oily, resinous substances which flow spontaneously, or by incision, from certain trees or plants’.132 The Old Testament also refers

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to a balsam-tree (Amyris opobalsum), which is not necessarily the source of the balsam of Gilead.133 The ancient custom of embalming the dead is thwarted by Jesus’ resurrection, and so the Old Testament associations also work to extend the poem’s original connection with the context of the Tenebrae service. In the poem ‘Funeral Music’ from King Log (1968), Hill refers to another kind of botanical ointment, ‘spikenard’, derived from the species of valerian, Nardostachys jatamansi.134 In the New Testament story of the anointing of Christ in Bethany (in Matt. 26: 6–13; Mark 14: 3–9; John 12: 1–8) a woman pours spikenard from an alabaster box onto Jesus’ body. When the disciples upbraid her for wasting the precious liquid which could have been sold to raise funds to help the poor, Jesus defends the woman, replying that while they will always have the poor, his own time on earth is limited, and that this anointing will serve as a preparation for his imminent burial. Hill writes, So many things rest under consummate Justice as though trumpeters purified law, Spikenard were the real essence of remorse.135 In the New Testament story, the sweet perfume of the spikenard pervades the house in Bethany as a lingering reminder of the approaching sorrow of Jesus’ death. In this association, the sweet scent and bitter emotion are symbolically connected: Christ’s sacrifice is the bitter-sweet agent of Christian salvation. In a pun on the different meanings of ‘essence’, Hill challenges the customary view of spikenard ointment as a sufficient representation of the character of remorse or contrition, the first component of the sacrament of penance. For Hill, remorse needs to involve more than spikenard; it demands the unalloyed bitterness of a contrition which is not ultimately associated with the possibility of reconciliation. Allusions to biblically significant botanicals in Hill poetry are thus inevitably also references to various forms of theological disillusionment, including the post-Holocaust theological context. References to resin recur throughout Celan’s poetry, often in connection with the Biblical usages of the word. ‘Talglicht’ (‘Tallow lamp’) was originally published in Celan’s first volume of poetry, Der Sand aus den Urnen (1948), and appeared again after this was withdrawn from circulation in his second volume, Mohn und Gedächtnis (1952). The tallow light of the title presumably illuminates

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the monks’ perusal of the Bible described in the poem’s opening line: ‘The monks with hairy fingers opened the book: September.’ The September Bible was the German translation by Luther of the New Testament, published in September 1522. Tallow candles were traditionally made from animal fat, but tallow can also refer to the resinous substances obtained from plants and also used for candlemaking, the ‘tallow shrub’ being an alternative name for the wax myrtle or bayberry (Myrica cerifera) (Oxford English Dictionary). A second reference to resin occurs in the poem ‘Ich bin allein’ (‘I am alone’), from Mohn und Gedächtnis. This short poem describes a mood of mournful, solitary waiting and is addressed to an absent female figure. The poem’s narrator apparently performs two ritual acts of remembrance or devotional observance, one for each stanza, the second of which involves resin: ‘I stand in the pile of faded hours / and save resin for a late bird.’ The bird is late, like the noise of the crackling myrtle leaves symbolising faithfulness in the later poem, ‘Stimmen’ (‘Late noise, outside time’). The quality of lateness is part of faithfulness, since it is a commitment to another which entails waiting or staying: faithfulness means staying true. This connection is also made in Hill’s reference to balsam in ‘The Pentecost Castle’, as the place where the plant grows is where ‘love / rests and is saved’ (my emphasis). In the sixth penitential psalm, the psalmist’s faith in God is exemplified in his capacity to wait for Him: ‘My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning’ (Ps. 130: 6). Resin itself exemplifies these qualities of watchfulness and faithfulness, since it is exuded slowly and gradually in a manner commensurate with its viscous texture. References to resin in Celan’s texts can be associated with the attitude of waiting involved in faithfulness without necessarily implying the anticipation of consolation or absolution that attends religious faithfulness. They thus complement the operation of the desanctified confessional address in Celan’s poetic response to the Holocaust, which proceeds in the absence of the possibility of salvation. ‘Stille!’ (‘Quiet!’), the fourth from last poem in Mohn und Gedächtnis, uses an alternative word for a resinous substance which points towards the Biblical usage. The poem’s second stanza recounts how: We drank with greedy mouths: it tasted like gall, but it flows like wine – 136

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This combination of gall and wine recalls the account of Jesus’s crucifixion in Matthew in which Jesus is offered ‘vinegar … mingled with gall’ (27: 33–34) and thus brings us back to the penitential context of the Tenebrae service, held in remembrance of Christ’s death. Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Canticle for Good Friday’ describes the smell of ‘vinegar and blood’ at the crucifixion.137 Vinegar refers to a sour wine which would aggravate rather than quench thirst. Gall, in its broadest meaning of any bitter substance, is a synonym for myrrh, which is the preferred word in the parallel account of the crucifixion in the Gospel of Mark (15: 23): ‘And they gave him to drink wine mingled with myrrh: but he received it not.’ Wine mixed with myrrh was administered as a palliative and Jesus’ refusal of the drink may be interpreted in terms of his willingness to submit to the full lot of his pain and suffering. A version of this episode is recounted by Hill in stanza XLV of The Triumph of Love.138 Luke’s Gospel records how before the crucifixion, ‘And the soldiers also mocked him, coming to him, and offering him vinegar’ (23: 36). The drink of wine or vinegar mixed with gall is offered to Jesus upon arrival at Golgatha, before the crucifixion only in Matthew and Mark’s Gospels, and vinegar alone is mockingly offered in Luke. Three of the Gospels record a subsequent offering to Jesus of a sponge dipped in vinegar on the end of a cane shortly before his death on the cross (Matt. 27: 48; Mark 15: 36; John 19: 28–30). The account is most extensive in the Johannine text: After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst. Now there was set a vessel full of vinegar: and they filled a sponge with vinegar, and put it upon hyssop, and put it to his mouth. When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost. Hyssop, another aromatic, bitter-tasting herb (Hyssopus officinalis), was used by the ancient Israelites for sprinkling liquid in ritual purification, including the blood of the Passover, the cure of leprosy and the Covenant sacrifice (Exodus 12: 22; Lev. 14: 4, 6; Hebrews 9: 19). In the penitential Psalm 51, the Misere, recited twice on each day of the Tenebrae service, David asks God if He will cleanse him with hyssop (51: 7). Commentators agree about the likely confusion in John’s Gospel of the Hebrew word for a javelin (hysso) with that for the herb (hyssopo).139 The javelin would correspond more closely with

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the function being described here, since a long stick would be required to reach Jesus’s mouth on the cross and the stem of the hyssop plant is relatively short. The word ‘hyssop’ persists in translations because of its long-standing association with sacrificial purification. Bitter herbs are connected with experiences of suffering and thereby with penitential and confessional contexts in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Jesus’s thirst on the cross was both literal and symbolic. Psalm 42 describes the psalmist’s longing for God as a metaphorical thirst (42: 1–2). Psalm 22, which contains the cry uttered by Jesus on the cross before his death and before he is offered the sponge of vinegar in Matthew and Mark, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ also describes the psalmist’s sufferings in terms of thirst (22: 16). Jesus’s sufferings on the cross are undergone according to those of the psalmists in the Hebrew Bible. The New Testament passages also recall the text of Psalm 69 in which the exiled psalmist lists his sufferings on God’s behalf and pleads with God to intervene. The psalmist is given bitter food and drink by his detractors, which in both the English and German versions includes vinegar to drink. Both psalms 22 and 69 are interpreted by the Christian church as prefiguring the sufferings of Christ and are used in church services during Holy Week as Passion Psalms, including the Tenebrae service. The first nocturn of Tenebrae for Maundy Thursday, which is recited in church on Ash Wednesday, opens with Psalm 69.140 The significance of gall in connection with confessional utterance is thus derived from its usage in the penitential psalms. Celan’s use of the word ‘Galle’ suggests an additional penitential context in connection with Augustine’s Confessions. When, as a student at Carthage, Augustine succumbs to the sexual temptations which surround him, he describes it as a bitter-sweet experience: ‘“My God, my mercy” in your goodness you mixed in much vinegar with that sweetness’.141 Augustine’s confession opens with the appeal to God from Psalm 58: 18, and continues in the terms of the New Testament crucifixion stories. The bitter-sweet character of his guilty pleasure, which he goes on to recount in more specific detail, is translated into the tone of his confession which embraces the Christian idea in which the greatest sinner is received most lovingly by God, providing his confessions are heartfelt. The reference to gall in Celan’s ‘Stille!’ points particularly towards the New Testament crucifixion stories when considered in the context of the botanical imagery elsewhere in the poetic text.142 In the first

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stanza, the poet drives a thorn into the heart of the addressee. In several of the crucifixion accounts, Jesus is mockingly given a crown of thorns to wear by the soldiers who put him to death (Matt. 27: 29; Mark 15: 17; John 19: 5). As such, thorns are integral to Christian iconography of the crucifixion, and Jesus’ forehead is often depicted as bleeding from the wounds caused by the thorns. In Celan’s poem, the thorn belongs to a rose, and the rose itself bleeds. The German verb bluten (to bleed) is etymologically and phonetically close to the word for flowers and blossoms (Blüten) and for the verb meaning to be in flower or to bloom (blühen), so the rose’s unnatural bleeding in the poem is linked with the natural process of flowering. The rose, and the heart pierced by a thorn in Celan’s poem, both represent the Virgin Mary in Christian symbolism. The final lines of the poem present a bitter-sweet combination, like that of wine and gall in the second stanza: ‘Quiet! The thorn pushes deeper into your heart: / it is in league with the rose’. The lines describe a mutually dependent relationship between thorn and rose, like that in the English expression, ‘No rose without a thorn’. In the context of the crucifixion, this relates to Christ’s suffering on the cross which he underwent in order to bring about mankind’s salvation: suffering and redemption are inextricably linked. Jesus refused the bitter mixture of vinegar-wine and gall which he was offered prior to his crucifixion so that the pain which was his lot would not be allayed, and the resulting salvation would be correspondingly unalloyed. In Celan’s poem, this benumbing mixture is greedily imbibed (‘Wir tranken mit gierigen Mündern’) to signify a refusal of the redemptive Christian ending. As was explicitly the case in Celan’s ‘Tenebrae’, ‘Stille!’ implicitly refuses to countenance remembrance of Christian suffering which does not also take into account Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. In contrast to the gall in ‘Stille!’, the balsam in Celan’s 1948 poem ‘Festland’ (‘Mainland’), like the references to resin in ‘Stimmen’ and ‘Ich bin allein’, helps to bring about a redemptive resolution to the poetic narrative. Barbara Wiedemann-Wolf, in her study of Celan’s early poems, has commented on the specificity of meaning of the botanical references in his work.143 The different effects of these words within their respective poems are mediated by the diction. ‘Gall’ emphasizes the bitter properties of botanical resin, while ‘balsam’ or ‘resin’ stresses its healing, medicinal qualities. The use of the word ‘Galle’ within the wider context of ‘Stille!’ also sets up connections with accounts of suffering in the psalms and Christian imagery from the crucifixion stories, whereas the ‘Balsam’ of ‘Festland’ and the

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‘sweet’ from the Linden in ‘Irrsal’ avoid such immediate connotations and the reference to resin in connection with characteristic myrtle leaves sets up the association with the ancient Jewish measure of the beloved’s faithfulness. Geoffrey Hill’s long poem The Orchards of Syon is richly populated with trees and plants, many of which have medicinal qualities and relate to the images of resin which are so abundant in Mohn und Gedächtnis and the individual poems which Celan published during the period of that volume’s composition, as well as the later Sprachgitter. The first reference to resin-like substances occurs in the seventh stanza and describes ‘oils of unction’ as having the potential to stave off death for some people: Tell him he is alive – someone – and responsible. He may respond to that, as to other electrodes, as Lear to the sour-sweet music of viols, as some to oils of unction or to Gospel.144 The person referred to here is the poem’s author, references to whose mortality recur throughout the text. Unction may mean the general act of anointing a person with oil as part of a religious rite, or, more specifically, refer to the sacrament of extreme unction in which those close to death are administered their last rites. The seven Roman Catholic sacraments can be divided according to those which relate to transitional events in a person’s life, and so are performed only once during a lifetime, and those which are repeated. The sacraments of penance and the Eucharist are generally the only two which require repetition. Extreme unction, since it is supposedly performed immediately prior to death, is, like the majority of the sacraments, in principle non-repeatable. It is possible however, for scenarios like the one to which Hill refers to occur, in which a very sick person is revived after receiving the sacrament of extreme unction, and thus subsequently requires a second anointing. The reference to ‘oils of unction’ sets up associations with a range of Biblical texts, from the descriptions of sacrificial rituals in the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament story of Jesus’s anointing at Bethany. A further reference to healing botanicals occurs shortly afterwards, near the beginning of the eighth stanza: No mystery I tell you, though in the first instance it is a gift, one that you owe me,

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the square-stemmed woundwort I have been brought to consider, precious as peppercorn once was.145 The ‘woundwort’ connects with the ‘oils of unction’ in the previous stanza. It can apply to any of a range of plants which have been used for healing wounds, and so might include the salving botanical extracts which are combined in oils of unction. Woundwort is also more particularly a designation for a labiate plant of a group which includes hyssop, the bitter-tasting herb which was discussed above in relation to the reference to gall in Celan’s poem ‘Stille!’ The poetic voice here appears to be that of the author, who in the previous stanza was discussed in the third person. The speaker addresses the land of England, which owes him the ‘gift’ of woundwort (‘You owe me, Albion’). We might ask under what circumstances a gift can be owed, given that once a gift is required by its recipient, its status as a gift becomes questionable. As Hill writes in The Triumph of Love, ‘A thing / given is not always, or even, a gift, / … / A gift is a donation’.146 Albion may have harmed the speaker so that the woundwort constitutes a reparatory, healing offering. The allusion here might also be to the Gospel story of Jesus’s anointment in Bethany in which the woman makes a gift of valuable ointment to Jesus, to whom all gifts are due. The reference to the gift of ‘square-stemmed woundwort’ to the poetic speaker establishes connections with various kinds of offerings made to Christ, either as preparation for or during his death, including the gall which features in the penitential context of confessional remembrance of the Tenebrae service. In a subsequent reference to woundwort in the nineteenth stanza, the poetic voice has applied it to himself: Hedgerow woundwort, this was the healing touch I brought upon myself through memory, and lack of thought, absence without leave, weedy ecstasy, or worse.147 It remains unclear in this quotation as to whether the restoration enjoyed by the poet was brought about by his having remembered the qualities of woundwort and applied it in some way, or whether he has devoted himself to his memory in such a way that it afforded him a woundwort-like rejuvenation. Both possibilities are sustained in the syntax. In either case the oxymoronic ‘weedy ecstasy’ – punning on the possible status of woundwort as a ‘weed’ – undermines the

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fulfilment of the earlier phrase ‘healing touch’. The speaker is suspicious of anything which takes him thoughtlessly outside himself, be it a botanical stimulant or the act of losing oneself in memory. Hill instigates the questioning of what he most values: remembrance. This questioning of things that are taken for granted continues in the text which follows: Could Goldengrove have been at any time The Wood of the Suicides? Hill cites the title of the thirteenth canto of Dante’s Inferno, in which he describes a nightmarish forest of dead leaves and agonisingly twisted boughs. The assumed paradise of Goldengrove is here compared to its hellish opposite, just as the healing properties of woundwort have been questioned and memory, ordinarily meaning for Hill a careful effort of thought, has been briefly posited as thoughtless. So the ‘oils of unction’ in the seventh stanza and the ‘woundwort’ at the opening of the eighth stanza, while they relate to an internal narrative of invocation in The Orchards of Syon, in which the author or poetic voice is anointed and awakened so that he begins to speak, are also connected to the narrative of events surrounding the crucifixion in the Gospels, like the ‘wild balsam’ and ‘spikenard’ of Celan’s earlier poems. It is these events which are remembered in the Christian service of Tenebrae. Remembrance of these events occurs according to a prescribed ritual sequence, including extensive readings from the Old Testament and passages from the New Testament. It is both a guilty remembrance, dominated by the mood of the seven penitential psalms, and a confessional remembrance addressed to God and acknowledging what is due to him. Part of the function of the botanical references in Hill’s work is the thematic connection which they create with Christ’s passion and rituals of anointing and embalming, and thence to the formal ways in which this is remembered, including the Tenebrae service and the confessional aspect of the sacrament of penance. References to balsam and gall function in different ways in Celan’s and Hill’s poetry which are specific to their poetic contexture, but they frequently communicate ideas about faith. Their conceptions of faith range from faithfulness to another beyond what it is possible to say to them (the myrtle resin in Celan’s ‘Stimmen’ and ‘Ich bin allein’, the ‘wild balsam’ in Hill’s ‘The Pentecost Castle’) to various degrees of

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faithlessness in Christian salvation (the spikenard in Hill’s ‘Funeral Music’, the oils of unction and woundwort in his Orchards of Syon, the gall in Celan’s ‘Stille!’). The confessional address of their poetry is maintained in relation to these differing evocations of faith, drawing upon and taking issue with the Judaeo-Christian Biblical frame of reference and its forms of remembrance. Any sense of absolution attendant upon their poetry’s confessional act is necessarily postponed, either in the faithfulness of waiting or the faithlessness of rejection, because as their poetological statements demonstrate, the continuing act of interrupted confession itself constitutes their poetic response to the Holocaust. Atemwende In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault identifies the decline of explicit sexual references in seventeenth-century linguistic communication with the evolution of the sacrament of penance following the Council of Trent.148 The sacrament of penance was a primary means of defining the limits of acceptable behaviour and thence of acceptable speech. For Foucault, confession is simultaneously ‘one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth’ and an insidious tool of social manipulation.149 Following Foucault, authors of sociological studies of confession tend to resist the assumption of the moral desirability or psychological necessity of confession. Mike Hepworth identifies ‘a permanent paradox in the relationship between the [Christian] ideal of spontaneous confession and the practical obligation to confess’.150 Jeremy Tambling warns against ‘the power of confession to secure consent to the rule of a dominant ideology’.151 Chloë Taylor seeks to expose ‘the historicity and hence the contingency of confession’.152 While there are certainly questions to be raised concerning the ways in which confession became an institutionalized part of Western culture, relating, for example, to the manipulation of penitents by unscrupulous church authorities, literary approaches to confession, from Chaucer’s ‘Pardoner’s Tale’ onwards, remain to some extent outside these considerations since they, as we see in the texts by Celan and Hill, challenge the prevailing assumptions about power and authority in Church and society. Hill’s humorous evocation of a short, explanatory note left to explain an absence in stanza LXIII of The Triumph of Love epitomizes his scepticism regarding some aspects of the Church’s institution of sacramental confession: ‘I may be gone some time. Hallelujah! / Confession and recantation in fridge’.153 This

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stanza challenges a culture of commoditized, ready-made penance which can be stored in the fridge like convenience-food for use at a later time. In ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’, the mariner’s obligation to tell and retell his story are an ongoing form of penance. Stanley Cavell identifies the relationship between confession and penance in Coleridge’s poem, in which ‘the Hermit’s prescription is of a confession the very telling of which constitutes penance’.154 The only way for the ancient mariner to live with his past crime is through the renewed humility of future confession; his impulse to remember and to confess determines the structure of his life and the structure of Coleridge’s poetic narrative. His life will never be easy for it is predicated upon the uneasy requirement continually to remember his transgression. The mariner’s penance must be to embark on this nomadic course as a wandering eternal penitent, assuming a role like that of the fugitive figure of the wandering Jew, or of the Biblical wanderer, Cain. While we may challenge the degree to which the ancient mariner’s seemingly spontaneous impulse to confess is, in fact, culturally constructed, what remains is nonetheless an admission of guilt to another person whose attention as a listener is sustained throughout. So when Tambling characterizes confession as ‘a speaking into the silence’ which denies the confessing subject any true contact with the other, he is perhaps underestimating the communicative value of an attentive listening which is necessarily manifested as silence.155 Dennis A. Foster elaborates on the motivations of those who hear literary confessions: ‘The desire to understand such tales is motivated in part by the pleasure of mastery, but linked to that pleasure is an obligation: you cannot count on knowing yourself if you cannot make sense of this other. Like the story told by the ancient mariner, it sets the listener to work.’156 This ‘work’ to understand the other which is inscribed in the confessional structure of address is the ethical basis of the activity of poetry written in response to the Holocaust. The ancient mariner’s fate of retelling his story in repeated confessional acts, while never being absolved, is a not unfitting confessional model for the writer of poetry in response to the Holocaust. The idea of an ongoing confessional address in relation to the Holocaust is reflected in Celan’s and Hill’s own literary careers, as well as in the textual operation of their poetry. At the start of his book on Holocaust literature, A Double Dying, Rosenfeld cites a quotation from Piotr Rawicz which includes the statement: ‘It would seem that one does not stop being a Holocaust writer whatever one’s theme is.’157

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A similar sentiment is expressed in a moment of self-parody in stanza XCVIII in Hill’s The Triumph of Love which occurs within a group of stanzas describing events from the Holocaust. Hill’s narrator refers to a man who may be identified as Hill through his marriage to a Jew and ‘has buzzed, droned, / round a half-dozen topics (fewer, surely?) / for almost fifty years’.158 Rowland observes in his book Holocaust Poetry that ‘Hill has explored the problems of secondary witnessing and the vicarious past for over fifty years.’159 In his discussion of Augustine’s Confessions, Tambling describes how ‘Confessional practices seem actually to delay the sense of a plot, of a change taking place, introducing instead, as it were, an endless metonymic displacement, a deferral of narrative.’160 Given their repeated poetic demonstrations of the untenability of traditional Judaeo-Christian conceptions of God after the Holocaust, the acts of confession in Celan’s and Hill’s poetry occur in the absence of a divine addressee and thus of any possibility of absolution. The desanctified confessional address of their poetry is therefore necessarily a fractured speech-act which responds to the historical conditions of linguistic culpability. Its residual hope is the possibility of intersubjective encounter in the act of saying. Confession is a good model for understanding Celan’s and Hill’s poetry because it is consistent with observations about the operation of their poetry, as well as with their theoretical statements about how poetry works. Even when the structures of address in their texts are not obviously confessional, their poetry embodies a formal awareness of what Peter Robinson calls ‘the inevitable culpability of utterance’.161 In addition to confessing to various kind of guilt, their texts enact confessions of the inability to confess. Wainwright writes that, ‘One of the most insistent of Hill’s themes is that words are never for the wind. To speak, to write, is to act’.162 I have shown how the nature of this action, in both Hill’s and Celan’s poetry, is frequently a desanctified version of confessional address. The confessional model of the ‘Atemwende’, however, means that some of Celan’s and Hill’s poetry is indeed ‘beyond words’ or ‘for the wind’, where wind is the ‘breath-turn’ of an ‘Atemwende’, or what Hill in The Triumph of Love calls ‘the wind / beginning to turn, turning on itself ’.163 While poetic speech and writing is always a form of action, making confession to an addressee who is enjoined in remembrance, so too not to speak, not to write words is also a form of action, and is a necessary part of the operation of Celan’s and Hill’s poetry, which confesses through its interruptions and silences as well as though its voices. Michael Rothberg characterizes Adorno’s estimation of post-Holocaust art,

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including Celan’s poetry, in terms of its proximity to silence, where ‘This proximity is not an abdication but an articulation of suffering’.164 Celan’s and Hill’s poetry, then, as confession, engages with each aspect of the sacrament of penance: contrition, confession, satisfaction and absolution, or what Hill calls ‘the entire complex dance / of simple atonement’.165 The sacrament concludes with the conferral of absolution upon the penitent. Absolution is postponed in Celan’s and Hill’s poetry, since the ongoing expression of contrition in the act of confession is itself the only form of satisfaction which can be tendered as penance in response to the crimes of the Holocaust. Hill’s remarks on the forgiveness entailed by absolution in The Triumph of Love make explicit why confession in response to the Holocaust cannot end: ‘the Jew is not beholden / to forgiveness’ and later ‘I find it hard / to forgive myself ’.166 In spite of the impossibility of forgiveness in relation to the Holocaust, Hill’s answer to the self-imposed question, ‘What / ought a poem to be?’, near the end of this poem, which is by extension also an answer to the question ‘What ought a poem responding to the Holocaust to be?’ is nonetheless ‘a sad / and angry consolation’, repeated four times in emphatic italics.167 The idea of consolation is connected to Hill’s characterization of poetry as atonement in his inaugural lecture. Poetry, then, even while it withholds absolution, is itself a potential form of reconciliation, albeit one that is aware of its own inadequacy as such. Celan’s image of poetry as a message in a bottle conveys the necessity for the poetic address to be at least a saying to another, however uncertain their presence.168 The confessional address structured in relation to a largely – but not quite – unspeaking, unseen and unknown addressee describes a possible version of this relation. Within poetry’s angry consolation, the poetic speaker and addressee necessarily remain unconsoled. Poetry as a confessional response to the Holocaust is a speech act which variously enacts its own limits; in Celan’s case it exists on the edge of aphasia, in the ‘Atemwende’.169 In its ‘extreme concentration on technical discipline’ within language,170 it must aim at an operation which is thematically ‘beyond words’.171 As a kind of ‘secular justice clamant among psalms’, it confesses to its own inability to make confession of faith.172 Simultaneously ‘a spasm / a psalm’, it relies upon Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance which it also rejects.173 In the unforgiving disconsolation of its desanctified confessional address, Celan’s and Hill’s poetry remains attentive to the continually unfulfilled responsibility of remembering those who suffered and died during the Holocaust.

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NOTES 1. For discussions of literary writing about the Holocaust and religion see, for example, A.H. Friedlander, ‘Sachor im jüdischen Denken durch die Jahrtausende’, in S. Hödl and E. Lappin (eds), Erinnerung als Gegenwart: Jüdische Gedenkkulturen (Berlin: Philo, 2000), pp.11–31; D.G. Roskies, ‘The Holocaust According to the Literary Critics’, Prooftexts, 1, no.2 (May 1981), pp.209–16; D.G. Roskies (ed.), The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (Philadelphia, PA and Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1989); E. Wiesel, ‘Die Massenvernichtung als literarische Inspiration’, in Eugen Kogon (ed.), Gott nach Auschwitz: Dimensionen des Massenmords am jüdischen Volk (Freiburg: Herder, 1989), pp.21–50. George Steiner argues that ‘L’univers concentrationnaire has no true counterpart in the secular world. Its analogue is Hell’, and that consequently, literary representations of the camps draw on the long Christian-artistic tradition of portraying Hell, In Bluebeard’s Castle (London: Faber & Faber, 1989), p.47. Detailed research exists relating to the significance of Christian symbolism within the responses to the Holocaust in the graphic arts. See, for example, Ziva Amishai-Maisels, ‘Christological Symbolism and the Holocaust’, in Y. Bauer (ed.), Remembering for the Future – Volume II: The Impact of the Holocaust on the Contemporary World (Oxford: Pergamon, 1989), pp.1657–71. In the fifth chapter of her PhD thesis on ‘Holocaust Themes in Israeli Art’, Chitra Lekha Menon examines the extensive use of Christian symbolism by Jewish visual artists in their depiction of the Holocaust, ‘Holocaust Themes in Israeli Art’ (Unpublished PhD thesis: School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 1999), pp.196–212. In his PhD thesis, ‘The Memory of Modernism: Abstract Art and the Holocaust’, Mark Benjamin Godfrey considers the use of Christian iconography in the visual representation of the Holocaust by Christian and Jewish artists, and finds evidence of the crucifixion being used to depict the fate of Jews in Germany from as early as 1933 (Unpublished PhD thesis, University College London, 2002), pp.133–8. 2. A. Reiter, Narrating the Holocaust, trans. P. Camiller (London and New York: Continuum, 2000), pp.1–2. 3. Existing studies of confession and literature include: Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Dennis A. Foster, Confession and Complicity in Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Jeremy Tambling, Confession: Sexuality, Sin, the Subject (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); and Chloë Taylor, The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). None of these, however, is primarily concerned either with poetry, or with literature written in response to the Holocaust. A volume edited by Kate Sontag and David Graham, After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2001) discusses the legacy of the American genre of ‘confessional poetry’, although largely without reference to the Judaeo-Christian confessional tradition. 4. G. Hill, New & Collected Poems 1952–1992 (Boston, MA and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), p.8. 5. In E. Levinas, Unforeseen History, trans. N. Poller (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), p.xi.

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6. R. Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p.168. 7. E. Levinas, Proper Names, trans. M.B. Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p.44. 8. Ibid., p.45. 9. M. Eskin, Ethics and Dialogue: In the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandelśhtam, and Celan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), see pp.28, 54–65. 10. I. Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History, trans. R.P. Scheindlin (Philadelphia, PA and Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1993), pp.107–77. 11. M. Hepworth and B.S. Turner, Confession: Studies in Deviance and Religion (London: Routledge, 1982), pp.8–9. 12. See Tambling, Confession, p.35. 13. B. Horne, ‘What has been Lost? Penance and Reconciliation Reconsidered’, in M. Dudley and G. Rowell (eds), Confession and Absolution (London: SPCK, 1990), pp.135–46, see p.137. 14. Ibid., p.138. 15. Fr. H.S.J. Thwaites, Confession (Devon: Augustine, 1985), p.3. 16. J.C. Winslow, Confession and Absolution (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1960), p.vii. 17. Ibid., pp.25–6. 18. See Hepworth and Turner, Confession, p.12. 19. See Thwaites, Confession, p.14. 20. See Tambling, Confession, p.2. 21. See G. Hill, ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement”’, in The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984), pp.1–18, see p.1; G. Hill, ‘Under Judgement’, The New Statesman, 8 February 1980, pp.212–14, see p.212. 22. M. Jaidka, Confession and Beyond: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (Chandigarh, India: Arun, 1992), p.i. 23. G. Hill, The Orchards of Syon (London: Penguin, 2002), p.1. 24. G. Hill, ‘Meaningful Speech’, Publisher’s Weekly, 8 April 2002, p.198. 25. G. Hill, ‘The Art of Poetry’, The Paris Review, 154 (Spring 2000), pp.272–99, see p.298. 26. J. Wainwright, Acceptable Words: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p.7. 27. A. Rowland, Holocaust Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p.19. 28. H. Haughton, ‘“How fit a title…”: Title and Authority in the Work of Geoffrey Hill’, in P. Robinson (ed.), Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), pp.129–48, see p.132. 29. V. Liska, Die Nacht der Hymnen: Paul Celans Gedichte 1938–1944 (Bern: Peter Lang, 1993), p.142. 30. J. Bayley, ‘Somewhere is such a Kingdom: Geoffrey Hill and Contemporary Poetry’, in P. Robinson (ed.), Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), pp.185–95, see p.193. 31. See Rowland, Holocaust Poetry, p.66. 32. Ibid., pp.62–3. 33. See Hill, ‘The Art of Poetry’, p.284.

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34. See Hill, ‘Under Judgement’, p.212. 35. See Hill, ‘Meaningful Speech’, p.198. 36. G. Hill, The Enemy’s Country: Words, Contexture, and Other Circumstances of Language (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p.81. 37. G. Hill, ‘Interview with John Haffenden’, Viewpoints (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), p.99. 38. P. Celan, Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), III, p.186. References cite the volume number in Roman numerals, followed by the page number. 39. Ibid., p.186. 40. A. Suied, Kaddish Pour Paul Celan (Yonne: Obsidiane, 1989), p.10. 41. See Hill, The Orchards of Syon, p.67. 42. G. Hill, The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984), p.140. 43. See Celan, Gesammelte Werke, III, pp.185–6. 44. R. Pordzik, History as Poetry: Dichtung und Geschichte im Werk von Geoffrey Hill (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1994), p.13. 45. Eskin, Ethics and Dialogue, p.62. 46. See Celan, Gesammelte Werke, III, p.196. 47. See Hill, The Lords of Limit, p.3. 48. K. Leeder, ‘The Address of German Poetry’, German Life and Letters, LX, no.3 (July 2007), pp.277–93, see p.279. 49. S. Felman and D. Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.ii, 38. 50. See Celan, Gesammelte Werke, III, p.186. 51. Ibid., p.198. 52. J.K. Lyon, ‘Paul Celan and Martin Buber – Poetry as Dialogue’, PMLA, 86, no.1 (1971), pp.110–20, see p.110. 53. L. Olschner, Der feste Buchstab. Erläuterungen zu Paul Celans Lyrikübertragungen (Göttingen and Zürich: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985), see pp.52, 50–6. 54. L. Olschner, ‘Anamnesis: Paul Celan’s Translations of Poetry’, Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, 12, no.2 (1988), pp.163–97. See also Peter Eli Gordon’s assertion that, ‘Correct translation, for Heidegger as well as for Buber and Rosenzweig, is a metaphysical retrieval – an act of anamnesis’, in Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), p.268. 55. S.T. Coleridge and W. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (London: Routledge, 1991), p.10. 56. A.H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington, IN and London: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp.5–6. 57. S. Vice, Holocaust Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p.3. 58. P. Celan, Die Gedichte, ed. B. Wiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), p.99. 59. Ibid., p.643. 60. N.J. Meyerhofer, ‘The Poetics of Paul Celan’, Twentieth Century Literature, 27, no.1 (Spring 1981), pp.72–85, see p.83. 61. P. Celan, Nineteen Poems, trans. M. Hamburger (Oxford: Carcanet Press, 1972), p.12. 62. See Celan, Die Gedichte, p.192.

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63. See Lyon, ‘Paul Celan and Martin Buber’, p.112. 64. G.H. Hartman, The Longest Shadow (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p.164. 65. See Celan, Die Gedichte, p.95. 66. L. Olschner, ‘Poetic Mutations of Silence: at the Nexus of Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam’, in A. Fioretos (ed.), Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan (Baltimore, MD and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp.369–85, see p.380. 67. See Celan, Gesammelte Werke, III, p.197. 68. See Hill, New & Collected Poems 1952–1992, p.72. 69. See Celan, Gesammelte Werke, III, p.195. 70. L. Olschner, Im Abgrund Zeit. Paul Celans Poetiksplitter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), p.12. 71. See Felman and Laub, Testimony, p.42. 72. H. Schweizer, Suffering and the Remedy of Art (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), p.148. 73. See Meyerhofer, ‘The Poetics of Paul Celan’, p.76. 74. See Hill, The Orchards of Syon, p.32. 75. Ibid., see pp.28, 28, 31, 31, 32, 36, 51. 76. See my consideration of S. Burnside, ‘Senselessness in Paul Celan’s Mohn und Gedächtnis’, German Life and Letters, 59, no.1 (January 2006), pp.140–50. 77. G. Hill, The Triumph of Love (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp.8–9. 78. See Hill, ‘The Art of Poetry’, p.283. 79. E.M. Knottenbelt, Passionate Intelligence: The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), pp.249–51. 80. See Celan, Die Gedichte, p.145. 81. H. Thurston, Tenebræ (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1946), p.4. 82. Ibid., pp.5, 9. 83. A.F. Kirkpatrick (ed.), The Book of Psalms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), p.26. 84. M.E. Travers, Encountering God in the Psalms (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2003), see pp.51–2, 250. 85. See Hill, The Orchards of Syon, p.61. 86. I.H. Evans, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (fourteenth edition) (London: Cassell, 1989). 87. A. Stadler, Das Buch der Psalmen und die Deutschsprachige Lyrik des 20. Jahrhunderts (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1989), p.2. 88. See Hill, The Triumph of Love, p.12. 89. J. Felstiner, ‘Mother Tongue, Holy Tongue: On Translating and Not Translating Paul Celan’, Comparative Literature, 38, no.2 (1986), pp.113–36, see p.125. 90. See Celan, Die Gedichte, p.97. English translation by Michael Hamburger, Poems of Paul Celan (London: Anvil Press, 2007), p.129: We are near, Lord, near and at hand. Handled already, Lord, clawed and clawing as though the body of each of us were

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your body, Lord. Pray, Lord, pray to us, we are near. Askew we went there, went there to bend down to the trough, to the crater. To be watered we went there, Lord. It was blood, it was what you shed, Lord. It gleamed. It cast your image into our eyes, Lord.. Our eyes and mouths are so open and empty, Lord. We have drunk, Lord. The blood and the image that was in the blood Lord. Pray, Lord. We are near. 91. See, for example, the first penitential psalm, 6: 5: ‘For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in the grave who shall give thee thanks?’ 92. See, for example, psalms 10: 1; 22: 11; 27: 4, 9; 38: 21; 51: 11; 73: 27. Psalm 27 is the second psalm of the second nocturn in Tenebrae for Holy Saturday. Psalm 38 is the third penitential psalm and is the first psalm of the second nocturn in Tenebrae for Good Friday. Psalm 51, the Miserere, is the fourth penitential psalm and is recited twice during lauds in each Tenebrae service. 93. See Stadler, Das Buch der Psalmen, p.124. 94. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying, p.30. 95. See Thurston, Tenebræ, p.7. 96. See Hill, New & Collected Poems 1952–1992, p.55. 97. H. Gadamer, ‘Sinn und Sinnverhüllung bei Paul Celan’, in Poetica: Ausgewählte Essays (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1977), pp.119–34, see p.122. 98. Ibid., p.124. 99. Ibid., p.130. 100. See Stadler, Das Buch der Psalmen, p.104. 101. See Hill, New & Collected Poems 1952–1992, pp.160–2. 102. In both instances of the word ‘Tenebrae’ in this quotation Hill is referring to the Christian service, not to his volume of poetry, and so the text should not be italicized. 103. See Hill, ‘Under Judgement’, p.213. 104. V. Sherry, The Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geoffrey Hill (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1987), p.188. 105. See Hill, New & Collected Poems 1952–1992, p.160. 106. Ibid., p.161. 107. E. McNees, Eucharistic Poetry: The Search for Presence in the Writings of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Geoffrey Hill (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1992), p.168. 108. See Sherry, The Uncommon Tongue, p.188. 109. See Hill, New & Collected Poems 1952–1992, p.59.

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110. C. Ricks, ‘Tenebrae and at-one-ment’, in Peter Robinson (ed.), Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), pp.62–85, see p.67. 111. See Sherry, The Uncommon Tongue, p.189. 112. See Levinas, Proper Names, p.46. 113. See Sherry, The Uncommon Tongue, p.189. 114. See McNees, Eucharistic Poetry, p.183, see pp.183–6. 115. See Wainwright, Acceptable Words, p.15. 116. Ibid., p.38. 117. See Hill, ‘Under Judgement’, p.212. 118. See Coleridge and Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, p.26. 119. Augustine, Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p.35. 120. See Hill, New & Collected Poems 1952–1992, p.9. 121. See, for example, A. Colin, Paul Celan: Holograms of Darkness (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), p.xiv; J. Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp.96, 245; J. Golb, ‘Reading Celan: The Allegory of “Hohles Lebensgehöft” and “Engführung”’, in A. Fioretos (ed.), Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan (Baltimore, MD and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp.185–218, see p.191; J.K. Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation (Baltimore, MD and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2006), p.204; R. Tobias, The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan (Baltimore, MD and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2006). 122. See Hartman, The Longest Shadow, p.162. 123. See Celan, Die Gedichte, p.91. 124. Voices, from which your heart recoils into the heart of your mother. Voices from the gallows-tree, where rings of late and early wood switch over and over. 125. See Celan, Die Gedichte, p.92. 126. Ibid., p.92. No Voice – a Late noise, outside time, given to your thoughts, here, finally watched for: a carpel, eye-sized, deeply etched; it drops resin, will not scar over. 127. Religious Tract Society, The Plants and Trees of Scripture (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1850), p.170. 128. See Evans, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 129. See Levinas, Proper Names, p.41.

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130. See Hill, ‘Interview with John Haffenden’, p.92. 131. See Hill, New & Collected Poems 1952–1992, p.128. 132. T. Mason Harris, A Dictionary of the Natural History of the Bible (London: Chiswick Press, 1833), p.29. 133. See Religious Tract Society, The Plants and Trees of Scripture, p.142. 134. Ibid., p.181. 135. See Hill, New & Collected Poems 1952–1992, p.62. 136. See Celan, Die Gedichte, p.52. 137. See Hill, New & Collected Poems 1952–1992, p.27. 138. See Hill, The Triumph of Love, p.22. 139. C. Gore, H.L. Goudge and A. Guillame (eds), A New Commentary on Holy Scripture (London: SPCK, 1951), p.268. 140. Revd C.C. Martindale, Tenebrae: Wednesday Evening (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1935), p.5. 141. See Augustine, Confessions, p.35. 142. Cf. Rochelle Tobias’s discussion of botanical imagery signifying the rejection of Christian transcendence in the final stanza of Celan’s ‘Psalm’ in The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan (Baltimore, MD and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2006), pp.104–5. 143. B. Wiedemann-Wolf, Antschel Paul – Paul Celan: Studien zum Frühwerk (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1985), pp.225–6. 144. See Hill, The Orchards of Syon, p.7. 145. Ibid., p.8. 146. See Hill, The Triumph of Love, p.23. 147. See Hill, The Orchards of Syon, p.19. 148. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality (Volume 1: An Introduction), trans. R. Hurley (London: Allen Lane, 1979), p.18. 149. Ibid., p.58. 150. See Hepworth and Turner, Confession, p.78. 151. See Tambling, Confession, p.7. 152. See Taylor, The Culture of Confession, p.11. 153. See Hill, The Triumph of Love, p.38. 154. S. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p.62. 155. See Tambling, Confession, p.6. 156. See Foster, Confession and Complicity in Narrative, p.5. 157. See Piotr Rawicz in Rosenfeld, A Double Dying. 158. See Hill, The Triumph of Love, p.51. 159. See Rowland, Holocaust Poetry, p.13. 160. See Tambling, Confession, pp.19–20. 161. P. Robinson (ed.), Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), p.x. 162. See Wainwright, Acceptable Words, p.6. 163. See Hill, The Triumph of Love, p.5. 164. M. Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p.46. 165. G. Hill, Canaan (London: Penguin, 1996), p.63. 166. See Hill, The Triumph of Love, pp.10, 82.

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167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173.

Ibid., p.82. See Celan, Gesammelte Werke, III, p.186. Ibid., p.195. See Hill, ‘Under Judgement’, p.212. See Hill, The Triumph of Love, p.9. See Hill, Canaan, p.30. Ibid., p.38.

3

Novelistic Prose as Anamnesis: Günter Grass and Imre Kertész In an appendix to his Notes to Literature entitled ‘Theses Upon Art and Religion Today’, originally published in the Kenyon Review in 1945, Adorno contends that ‘The lost unity between art and religion, be it regarded as wholesome or as hampering, cannot be regained at will.’1 The thesis which I will develop here, that remembrance of the Holocaust in novelistic prose writing may be structured as a desanctified version of the anamnestic address which is involved in the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, does not contradict Adorno’s point. As I have shown in the case of the relationship between poetry responding to the Holocaust and confession in the previous chapter, the literary texts in question are not advocating a return to religion, but they nonetheless depend upon a reconfiguration of JudaeoChristian forms of remembrance in order to respond to the Holocaust. Sacramental forms of remembrance, including confession and the Eucharist, suggest ritualized ways of speaking and acting which become both catalysts for and bearers of the act of remembrance itself. These forms are available to those writing in response to the Holocaust, as a way of structuring their responses. The possibilities for theological absolution entailed by the religious forms of remembrance are rejected in the literary context, in accordance with the objective of those writing about the Holocaust to preserve the knowledge of what Imre Kertész describes as ‘the wide-ranging ethical consequences of Auschwitz’.2 Geoffrey Hill’s characterization of poetry as ‘a sad / and angry consolation’ intimates the way in which his poetry postpones absolution and the attendant consolation through its continued act of confession.3 This operation is like the function ascribed to literature responding to the Holocaust by Günter Grass of ‘keeping the wound open’.4 Rather than proposing that a lost unity between art and religion is being regained, then, I argue that the structures of address involved in certain

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religious ways of remembering have been retained and reconfigured in a post-theological context to inform different literary ways of remembering the Holocaust. The remnant structures of theological address ultimately work to establish the possibility, within those literary texts, for an ethical reorientation on the part of the remembering subject in relation to their addressee(s). Adorno goes on to observe that the historical relationship between art and religion was never one of ‘purposeful cooperation’.5 Rather the interconnectedness between the two was an inevitable consequence of the way in which societies were organized. Similarly, even in the post-theological modern age, the presence of identifiably Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance as structuring principles in literary texts should not always be assumed to reflect an author’s intentions. While there are instances of deliberate ‘cooperation’ with or ‘co-opting’ of religious forms of remembrance in the texts I will examine in this chapter – as well as the explicit rejection of such cooperation – the formal relationship between the literary text and the anamnestic Christian sacrament is more usually inexplicit, although aspects of this relationship may be inferred from the authors’ statements about their work. Having warned against the incorporation of material involving religious themes in contemporary art, Adorno proceeds to attack the adoption of religious art forms: ‘It is equally futile to borrow religious forms of the past, such as the mystery play or the oratorio, while abstracting from the religious contents with which these artistic forms were bound up’.6 Adorno’s criticism is based on the idea that those who co-opt art forms which evolved as part of a religious framework at a time when that framework has largely lost its once extensive applicability to the way people live their lives, are seeking to restore a harmonious relationship between the individual and the community which is not so easily regained. He argues that such collective art forms will not by themselves be effective at restoring social cohesion. I consider texts not in relation to religious art forms but rather in terms of their resemblance to anamnestic aspects of forms of worship, including where this resemblance is figured in terms of rejection. The religious forms of remembrance are not deliberately taken up out of a sense of nostalgia for a bygone age but are part of an attempt to respond to the events of a horrific recent past by articulating remembrance of the Holocaust in acts of literary address. It is not only art which is regarded as appropriating aspects of religious practice. It is now commonplace to view psychoanalysis as a

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form of secular discourse which offers a means for self-understanding previously provided by religion. Thus, following Michel Foucault’s thesis in The History of Sexuality, sacramental confession may be understood as the precursor to Freud’s talking therapy. Iris Murdoch’s less well-known interpretation of the history of ideas posits Plato’s concept of anamnesis as the antecedent of the Freudian unconscious.7 Murdoch describes the Platonic idea of anamnesis as ‘a myth of recollection’, which aptly characterizes the subsequent status of his fanciful proposal that all learning proceeds by means of remembering knowledge that was acquired before birth.8 It is worth considering Plato’s idea of anamnesis here, however, since its associations are necessarily relevant to the use of the same term in the Greek version of the New Testament. Plato’s theory of knowledge as recollection is advanced in order to answer an epistemological question in the Meno dialogue about how it can be possible to launch an enquiry into something, in this case ‘virtue’, when one does not know what it is. These doubts are resolved once the search for all knowledge is posited as the representation of prenatal understanding through recollection. Socrates demonstrates this principle to Meno, his interlocutor, by posing a series of questions about geometry to an uneducated slave boy. When the boy manages to reach the correct conclusions, Socrates interprets this as proof of his immortal soul’s prenatal exposure to perfect forms of knowledge. All subsequent ‘learning’ then, is in fact a process of mining the unconscious, or ‘recovering the knowledge out of himself ’.9 For Socrates, remembering what we already know is imbued with the qualities of a moral action, which we can choose to exercise or not. Hence remembering requires courage: ‘you should take heart and, whatever you do not happen to know at present – that is, what you do not remember – you must endeavour to search out and recollect’.10 The same idea of anamnesis as a deliberate choice recurs in the Theaetetus dialogue in relation to Socrates’ analogy between the function of memory and an impressionable block of wax.11 The moral dimension to Platonic anamnesis arises because, as Dominic Scott notes, ‘Plato proposed not just a theory of innate knowledge, but of forgotten knowledge’.12 Forgotten knowledge comes with an obligation to try and remember it again. The Platonic notion of anamnesis shares with the Christian anamnestic sacrament a moral condemnation of forgetting to remember, although the moral obligation in the New Testament injunction to ‘Do this in remembrance of me’ is greater than that in the Platonic advocacy of anamnesis because of its theological

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status as a divine command. The secular requirement to remember the Holocaust to which Grass and Kertész are responding and which they also reiterate in their prose fiction, relies upon the kind of idea of remembrance as a moral duty valuable for its own sake which is advanced by Plato in the Meno, and upon something akin to the memorial conception of Vergegenwärtigung in the Hebrew Bible which is integral to the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist. Günter Grass and Imre Kertész are two Nobel Prize winning authors whose writings draw upon their – very different – experiences of the Second World War. Imre Kertész was born in 1929 into an assimilated Jewish family in Budapest and was imprisoned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald during 1944–45. Günter Grass was born in 1927 to a Protestant German father and a Slavic Roman Catholic mother and grew up in what was then the free city of Danzig. In 2003 Heinz Ludwig Arnold formulated a concise and apparently comprehensive summary of Grass’s involvement in the war: ‘Finished school in 1943, Reich Labour Service, air force helper, military service as a private in a tank crew, minor wound and military hospital, finally imprisonment as an American PoW and release.’13 Grass’s revelation in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 12 August 2006 that he was briefly a member of the Waffen-SS has necessitated a revaluation of his wartime career and his literary output, as well as his post-war status as a moral spokesperson for Germany.14 Grass has had a long literary career of international renown during which he has, as he puts it, ‘made quite a name for himself ’,15 and for many years prior to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999, Grass was dogged by speculation about when his turn for recognition by the Swedish academy would come. By contrast, Kertész’s career, as he documents in the semi-autobiographical passages in his 1990 novella, Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért, first translated from the Hungarian into English as Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1997), and his writer’s diary published as Valaki más. A változás krónikája in Hungary in 1997 and translated into German as Ich – ein anderer (I – Another) (1998), has been largely conducted away from media attention and moulded by the restrictions of living and working in Communist Hungary. Hence Kertész was surprised to be the recipient of the Nobel Prize in 2001. Grass’s and Kertész’s writing shares a concern with the difficulty of converting remembered experience into narrative and thus lends itself to my interest in the connections between literary form and remembrance in various kinds of written responses to the Holocaust.

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In Kertész’s novella Kaddish for a Child Not Born, the protagonist reflects on how the formal orientation which writing can provide is based upon what was originally a theological conception of writing as communication with God: I write because I have to write, and whenever one writes one sustains a dialogue, I read somewhere; while God still existed one sustained a dialogue with God, and now that He no longer exists one has to sustain a dialogue with other people, I guess, or better still, with oneself, that is to say, one talks or mumbles to oneself.16 In addition to illustrating Kertész’s conception of the communal, participatory quality of good prose fiction, which, as will be shown later, is an important aspect of the way in which remembrance of the Holocaust in prose writing relates to the anamnesis in the Eucharist, this statement exemplifies how religious ideas continue to inform secular positions. At an event in London as part of Jewish Book Week 2006, Kertész discussed how, despite not believing in God, he understands the best way to live as being to behave as though there is a God.17 He also makes this point in an entry from October 1990 in the ‘Tagebuchroman’ (‘Diary novel’), Galeerentagebuch (Diary from the Galleys), originally published as Gályanapló in 1992.18 An earlier diary entry from 1986 asks: ‘Who sees me? God?’,19 and the same idea recurs in Kertész’s short story, ‘Az angol lobogó’, first published in 1991, and translated into German in 1999 and into English as The Union Jack in 2004.20 In the writer’s diary, Ich – ein anderer, Kertész comments on the significance of this reflection: ‘We must think, and that also means live, as though someone was seeing – not us, not with our eyes, but rather through our lives.’21 Although he does not identify with a particular faith, Kertész repeatedly derives comfort from the idea of an omniscient presiding deity22 or Providence,23 as well as from the faith held by others. In Ich – ein anderer he describes the uplifting feelings he experiences upon being blessed by a beggar and after receiving a letter from a Christian reader.24 Kertész also describes his sense of there being a transcendent aspect to the world.25 Kertész’s way of relating to an absent God reflects the position set out by Adorno in the concluding section of Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics). Adorno considers the untenable positions of religion and culture in the world after Auschwitz and draws the same conclusions as Kertész in Galeerentagebuch. The events of the Holocaust have rendered any affirmation of metaphysical

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transcendence indefensible because the administrative brutality with which millions of people were murdered means it is no longer possible for death to be reconciled with the course of human life. In the postAuschwitz world, theology has been stripped of its content: ‘If every symbol symbolizes nothing but another symbol, another conceptuality, their core remains empty – and so does religion. This is the antinomy of theological consciousness today.’26 The philosopher Hans Jonas outlines the nature of the theological dilemma in his essay ‘The Concept of God After Auschwitz’, describing how ‘“Auschwitz” calls, even for the believer, the whole traditional concept of God into question’.27 For Jonas, the Holocaust renders untenable the already troubled notion of divine omnipotence, so that humankind’s fate is of its own making. The question remains, ‘Does that still leave anything for a relation to God?’28 Jonas’s theologically faltering answer sounds like ‘only just’. The perpetrators of the Holocaust included people who believed in God, and yet in Auschwitz God was manifestly absent, so given God’s absence, the only way to conduct one’s life so as to avoid the recurrence of ways of behaving which lead to Auschwitz is as if he were present. As Andrew Bowie observes, the way in which Adorno frames questions about humankind’s relationship with God after Auschwitz has generated a debate about ‘whether his thinking leads to a kind of covert theology which replaces philosophy, or whether he offers a whole new approach to what Habermas terms “post-metaphysical thinking”’.29 In Negative Dialectics Adorno is attempting not just to describe the consequences of the Holocaust for contemporary society, but to make available ways of thinking which will preclude the possibility for any repetition of what happened. Adorno’s philosophical project thus shares the same founding motivation as that of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas records how his life ‘is dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror’.30 As C. Fred Alford observes, ‘Not only do Levinas and the Frankfurt School share a similar analysis of totalistic thinking, but they share the guilt of it’.31 Levinas extends his central idea of the infinite responsibility of one individual towards the other into the political sphere of the ‘third party’ in two of his major works, Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974). Levinas argues for the necessary dependence of all truly just and equitable socio-political orders on this conception of infinitely accountable interpersonal relationships, since, implicitly, the non-recurrence of the Holocaust can only be guaranteed in states whose existence is predicated on

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irreducible ethical responsibility towards their citizens.32 Another key text in which Levinas elaborates on the relation between ethics and politics, and defends the necessity of legal and political systems, is the 1987 interview ‘Dialogue on Thinking-of-the-Other’.33 Although the English version of this text appears in a volume of Levinas’s collected writings in whose preface he explicitly distances himself from any political agenda,34 his responses to the interview questions set out the distinctively ethical dimension of politics. In Simon Critchley’s words, Levinas’s ‘ethics is ethical for the sake of politics, that is, for the sake of a more just society’.35 Although Adorno’s work can be conceived as a turn away from the potential abstractions of ethics to the pragmatism of social theory, Levinas’s philosophy shows how these are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Adorno and Levinas part company on the place of theology in their thinking in relation to the question of totalization. Adorno posits postAuschwitz individual responsibility in quasi-theological terms from which God is nonetheless absent, resulting in an emphasis on particularity. Levinas, on the other hand, explicitly models the intersubjective relationship on that posited between the individual and God in Descartes’s Third Meditation, in which the finite individual inadequately approaches infinity.36 Critchley stresses that Levinas does not mean that the other is God, but rather that the individual is substituted for God.37 Levinas makes it clear that ethics ‘is not the simple corollary of the religious; it is, in itself, the element in which religious transcendence receives its original sense’.38 In ‘God and Philosophy’ Levinas describes how ‘the idea of God breaks up the thought which is an investment, a synopsis and a synthesis, and can only enclose in a presence, re-present, reduce to presence or let be’.39 This is an account of how conceptions of ‘the Infinite’, whether they are divine or human, are not reducible to the content of language. In Levinas’s thinking, the only way of doing justice to the alterity to the other is in the act of ‘saying’ to them: ‘Saying bears witness to the other of the Infinite which rends me, which in the saying awakens me.’40 Saying is an ethical performance which means something over and above what is said. In this respect, Levinas’s ethical position is reinforced in the theories of language as ‘utterance’ developed in different contexts by Mikhail Bakhtin and J.L. Austin, which will be considered later in this chapter in the course of developing the relationship between the operation of remembrance in novelistic prose and Eucharistic anamnesis. Levinas’s account of the intersubjective reorientation, modelled on the human encounter with God, which is

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to take place within verbal communication as a consequence of the Holocaust, suggests how ethical reorientation may be accomplished in the literary texts I consider here. In the process of saying what happened during the Holocaust, in a textual utterance which is always addressed to someone, the remembering subject addresses themselves to the infinite otherness of those who suffered and died. The ethical reorientation occurs in the performative act of memorial witness rather than in the content of what is remembered. My consideration of the novelistic prose of Günter Grass and Imre Kertész proposes Eucharistic anamnesis as a performative model for the way in which their texts engage with the remembrance of the Holocaust. In the following section, ‘Eucharistic Anamnesis’, I provide an overview of the component of remembrance in the most important Christian sacrament and survey some of the theological views in this area. In the subsequent section ‘Novelistic Prose as Anamnesis’, I consider Grass and Kertész’s assessments of their literary work in their lectures and essays, as well as self-reflexive statements taken from the literary texts themselves, and show how their approaches are commensurate with a view of their prose writing as anamnesis. My argument is based upon three points of similarity between their novelistic prose and Eucharistic anamnesis: firstly, that both are deliberate acts of remembrance undertaken as ends in themselves; secondly, that both are acts of communion, involving a simultaneous appeal to multiple participants; and thirdly, that both entail remembrance as actualization which involves a corresponding commitment to action. In the next section, ‘Kaddish’, I examine the ways in which Kertész’s novella, Kaddish for a Child Not Born, engages with the Jewish tradition of prayer and show how this engagement may be extended to the operation of anamnesis in the Eucharist. In the final section, ‘Anamnesis in Danzig’, I read Grass’s Danzig novels as further examples of anamnestic prose. Eucharistic Anamnesis In Judaeo-Christian theology, as in Platonic philosophy, anamnesis offers a way of redeeming the past. The repeated remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice in the sacrament of the Eucharist becomes the route to salvation for Christian believers. Divine redemption is predicated upon one’s earthly conduct, and particularly upon one’s behaviour towards others. The Christian commandment to ‘Love God’ is immediately followed by the injunction to ‘Love thy neighbour’,

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suggesting how a loving relationship with God may be substantiated through loving human relationships. The ethical orientation towards others, and thence to God, is achieved via participation in the Christian sacraments. In the Eucharist, participants remember Christ’s sacrifice and this remembrance constitutes a moral act, valuable for its own sake. Despite a prevailing consensus that the sacrament of the Eucharist is the central component of Christian worship, Eucharistic worship in general and the anamnestic element in particular, is the subject of extensive theological debate. There are three aspects of Eucharistic remembrance which I will emphasize here because they are points of correspondence with the anamnestic address in novelistic prose written in response to the Holocaust. These aspects are that remembrance in the Christian sacrament is undertaken in fulfilment of a moral choice, as an act which is valued for its own sake; that it is a communal act of remembrance in which multiple actors may participate simultaneously; and that anamnesis is experienced as actualization and potentially has a transformative effect on those remembering in that it makes them more mindful of other people. The liturgist Dom Gregory Dix notes that despite considerable variation in the manner of its celebration, ‘From one point of view the eucharist is always in essence the same thing – the human carrying out of a divine command to “do this”’.41 Doing, then, is at the heart of the Eucharist, and so too is saying, although disputes abound as to whether or not Christ ever spoke the words commanding remembrance as they are quoted in I Cor. 11: 24, 25 and Luke 22: 19.42 David Gregg summarizes the different positions regarding exactly how the anamnestic command, ‘touto poieite eis ten emen anamnesin’ or ‘do this is in remembrance of me’, is to be fulfilled in the celebration of the Eucharist, and favours a theory which emphasizes the memorial aspect over the sacrificial or symbolic elements of the Eucharist.43 Within this interpretation, the Eucharist may sometimes be referred to as the ‘Sacrament of Remembrance’.44 Other commentators, such as G.D. Kilpatrick, reject the centrality of remembrance and consider the Eucharist primarily as sacrifice, based on a different rendering of the word ‘anamnesis’ and a different understanding of the nature of the Last Supper.45 This is a different conception again from that of the early Christian writers, such as Origen, who, as Herbert Newell Bate observes, invariably regard the main action of the Eucharist to be one of supplication.46 Bate, however, contests the suggestions by certain scholars that some early Christian Eucharistic rites did not include an anamnestic aspect.47 The idea of the Eucharist as a memorial ultimately

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relies upon ‘a belief in the intrinsic efficacy of performing a commemorative act’,48 which is to say that the remembrance which occurs in the Eucharist is theologically valued for its own sake. This idea of the act of remembrance being a valuable act in its own right derives from the way in which it is electively undertaken, as in Plato’s conception of anamnesis, described above, and is the first component of the similarity which I want to highlight between Eucharistic anamnesis and the remembrance of the Holocaust in Grass’s and Kertész’s novelistic prose. A further similarity between the enactment of anamnesis in the Eucharist and structure of address in novelistic prose written in response to the Holocaust is its corporate nature. Dix explains the linguistic and ritual basis for regarding the Eucharist as a communal act of worship: ‘all eucharistic worship is of necessity and by intention a corporate action – “Do this” (poieite, plural). The blessed Bread is broken that it may be shared, and “we being many” made “one Body”; the blessed Cup is delivered that it may be a “partaking of the blood of Christ”.’49 Dix’s account of the sequence of events at the Last Supper is based upon this conception of corporate Eucharistic worship.50 Neville Clarke similarly emphasizes the communal aspect of Eucharistic celebrations.51 Aaron Urio traces the origins of Christian communal worship organized around the remembrance of God’s saving acts in the Jewish liturgical tradition of collective actualization of the past.52 In common with other commentators on the Eucharist, Marjorie H. Sykes draws on Pedersen’s work on the Old Testament conception of remembrance in his 1926 study Israel which was discussed in Chapter One. Sykes describes how ‘To remember Christ, as to remember Yahweh, is to allow one’s thoughts and actions to be motivated by Him.’53 David Gregg also argues that the type of remembrance entailed by the Eucharist must be understood in terms of the Biblical way of remembering intended by the Hebrew root zkr, so that, ‘There is always a volitional implication, a “remember-anddo-something-as-a-result”.’54 Neville Clarke claims that both ideas operate in terms of Vergegenwärtigung or actualization, so that ‘for Biblical thought the Greek anamnesis and the Hebrew zekher have the sense of re-calling of re-presenting before God an event in the past so that it becomes living, powerful and operative’.55 This corresponds with the etymology of the Greek term ‘anamnesis’ as ‘ana-mnesis, implying remembering again or anew’.56 These considerations prompt Dix to challenge the customary translation of anamnesis in English:

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‘This is a sense which the Latin memoria and its cognates do not adequately translate and which the English words “recall” and “represent” will hardly bear without explanation, still less such words as “memorial” or “remembrance”.’57 Aaron Urio contends that the New Testament context of anamnesis ‘must be understood on the basis of its Old Testament roots in the Jewish paschal words, “this day shall be for you a memorial day … you shall observe it as an ordinance for ever” (Ex. 12:14)’.58 Richard J. Ginn shares the view of Christian anamnesis as a development of the memorial tradition in the Hebrew Bible, and elaborates on the active duties arising from the Christian anamnestic command: ‘the main characteristics which remembrance had exhibited in Judaism were also transfused into Christianity. Thus remembrance in Christianity could not be a straightforward “remembering”, rather remembrance had confessional implications and the anamnesis of Jesus Christ could not be exhaustively defined in terms of his death.’59 For Ginn,60 and for Bruce T. Morrill,61 Gregg’s ‘remember-and-do-something-as-a-result’ is realized in the imitatio Christi, the injunction to try and follow the pattern of Jesus’s life which follows from the remembrance of his sacrifice. The command to ‘do this in remembrance of me’ enjoins worshippers to a Christian way of living which seeks to respect and understand the suffering of others in the manner of Christ. Morrill’s account of the way in which Eucharistic anamnesis forms the basis of social conscience and thence informs political action in the political theology of the Roman Catholic theologian, Johann Baptist Metz, is instructive for the role of remembrance of the Holocaust in the prose fiction of Günter Grass and Imre Kertész. Morrill discusses Metz’s fusion of Adorno’s ‘criticism of an ontologization of suffering’ in Negative Dialectics with the New Testament account of Christ’s suffering to produce his concept of ‘dangerous memory’.62 For Metz, ‘Social and political consciousness is necessarily historical consciousness’, entailing ‘the remembrance of those who have suffered and died as victims of human efforts to dominate over nature and/or human beings’.63 The memory of suffering becomes ‘dangerous memory’ in its dual capacity to be critical of the increasingly instrumentalizing and materialistic tendencies in society and to stimulate people’s desire for social and political change. Metz’s Frankfurt School-inspired theology suggests parallels with Günter Grass’s Danzig narratives which criticize the way in which the ‘Wirtschaftswunder’ in post-war Germany was pursued at the expense of the memory of others’ suffering and implicitly call for socio-political .

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reform. Since institutionalized Roman Catholicism and the wider tenets of the Christian faith are objects of critique in Grass’s prose fiction, Eucharistic anamnesis could never assume the prominent role it plays in Metz’s thinking. Instead, remembrance of the Holocaust – alongside reflection on the prevailing unwillingness to remember in wartime and immediately post-war German society – becomes the foundation for Grass’s call for political action, although in ways which, as I will show, involve a reconfiguration of the address of the Eucharistic form of remembrance. There are also similarities between Metz’s conception of Eucharistic remembrance as producing a turn towards others and the effects of remembrance of the Holocaust in texts by Imre Kertész. Metz’s theology is founded upon an autobiographical experience of ‘dangerous memory’. The death of his childhood friends when all his company is killed soon after being conscripted into the Nazi army, and his subsequent silent cries of anguish in the forest, cause him to establish ‘his basic theological question not as “Who saves me?” or “What happens to me when I suffer, when I die?” but, rather, “Who saves you?” and “What happens to you when you suffer, when you die?”’64 The crucial effect of the anamnesis rubric is the turning towards others’ suffering. This turning toward and caring for the other, although not specifically within a Christian framework, is the subject of Tzvetan Todorov’s examination of the continuation of moral life as ‘ordinary virtue’ within the concentration camps. Todorov asserts that ‘The moral action par excellence is “caring”. Through caring, the “I” has as its goal the well-being of the “you” (whether singular or multiple).’65 Caring for others is a moral act which may be founded on remembrance in general, or Eucharistic anamnesis in particular. Kertész’s prose fiction strives, via the remembrance of the Holocaust which is structured in ways which variously reject and reinterpret the ritual context of Eucharistic anamnesis, to orientate the narratorial ‘I’ in relation to the ‘you’ of its addressees. Novelistic Prose as Anamnesis In their diaries, essays and lectures, Grass and Kertész repeatedly discuss their literary prose writing as a form of response to the Nazi murder of the European Jews, in the context of a wider discourse about the capacity of remembrance, including Judaeo-Christian remembrance. In a lecture given at the University of Frankfurt in 1990, Grass describes Auschwitz as the most significant event in his life which

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has influenced all his artistic production. Grass proposes a new chronology whereby the prevailing system of marking time in terms of the Christian event, as before and after Christ, would be reconfigured as pre- and post-Auschwitz.66 Grass’s suggestion implies that in order adequately to remember the Holocaust, the Christian timeframe must be forgotten. Kertész also discusses Auschwitz in terms of Christian chronology when, in Galeerentagebuch, he explains how Auschwitz dominates his thinking: No matter what I am thinking about, I am always thinking about Auschwitz. Even if I seem to be talking about something completely different, I am talking about Auschwitz. ... Auschwitz and everything to do with it (and what is there that doesn’t have anything to do with it?), is the greatest trauma for people in Europe since the crucifixion, even if it will perhaps take decades or centuries for them to recognize that.67 Kertész expresses the centrality of Auschwitz for European culture in terms of the Christian crucifixion: remembrance of the Holocaust and remembrance of Christ’s death are necessarily connected, at least as far as their joint significance for Western intellectual thought. Much later in his diary, in an entry from June 1990, just after the publication of his Kaddish novella, Kertész reflects again on the relationship between Judaeo-Christian and historical understanding: ‘One can understand the Bible very well without history, but never history without the Bible.’68 The interconnections between the Christian anamnesis and the remembrance of the Holocaust are further elaborated in Grass’s and Kertész’s novelistic prose writing in ways which point to the need for a transformation of Christian memorial obligations to take account of both the history of Christian antiSemitism and of the related Christian responsibility for Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. In a 1982 diary entry Kertész doubts that any kind of ethical transformation has taken place as a consequence of the Holocaust or people’s remembrance of it: ‘Everything has already happened and nothing has changed as a result. Auschwitz and Siberia are in the past (if they are in the past) and they have hardly touched human consciousness, ethically speaking nothing has changed.’69 The first sentence of this statement sounds like Max Horkheimer’s memorable verdict on the past, that ‘The slain are really slain’. Grass expresses the same sort of regrets in a lecture given in 1975.70 Kertész’s and Grass’s

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statements echo Adorno’s position regarding culture after the Holocaust in Negative Dialectics. Adorno considers how it is possible to go on living after Auschwitz in the knowledge of what happened when almost any mode of life after Auschwitz entails the perpetuation of the very social and cultural conditions which made Auschwitz possible. This is the reason why ‘All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage.’71 The only worthwhile response to the Holocaust then is the complete transformation of what we understand as social and cultural relations. In spite of their manifold doubts about its cultural manifestation, Kertész and Grass, like Walter Benjamin, maintain a residual faith in the transformative potential of remembrance. Remembrance of the Holocaust proceeds in their texts via a narratorial address to multiple addressees in response to the impossible but necessary duty of taking account of the infinite suffering of the victims. In a lecture delivered on his first visit to India in 1975, ‘According to Rough Estimates …’, Grass addresses what he identifies as the barbarous discrepancy between the human ability to perform incredibly precise technological feats of all kinds, and our inability to provide more than a rough estimate of the number of people dying annually due to starvation.72 Acknowledging the difficulty of formulating an adequate intellectual response to this situation, Grass introduces the parallel problem, which for him is the ground of his self-definition as a writer, of responding to the knowledge of the Holocaust: Born in the year 1927, I belong to a generation which perhaps did not directly participate in the German crime of murdering six million Jews, but which, nevertheless, till today bears the responsibility for it and cannot or does not wish to forget. I said: six million murdered Jews. Again a rough estimate. The figure is too large and abstract.73 This and numerous of Grass’s other post-war statements demand revaluation following his disclosure of his membership of the WaffenSS. Even though Grass did not personally murder Jews, he nonetheless belonged to an organization which was directly involved in genocide. This account requires additional scrutiny concerning the extent to which the widespread indifference of German civilians regarding the fate of the Jews can in fact be regarded as participation in their deaths, which is surely a component of the responsibility which Grass

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attributes to his generation of Germans. This form of passive complicity is relevant to his central thesis in the lecture that our access to international news and information about people suffering and dying in countries other than our own unavoidably makes us citizens with international responsibilities towards others. Kertész raises the same point in Ich – ein anderer, explicitly linking images of contemporary atrocities to the photographs and film footage taken in concentration camps: ‘From Africa we see pictures that are reminiscent of Auschwitz.’74 Grass admits that he is daunted by the difficulty of knowing how to discharge these responsibilities towards people suffering and dying abroad, just as he is overwhelmed by the difficulties of knowing how to respond to the Holocaust. Nearly forty years later, the difficulties in both these connections continue to be considerable. Yet by 1975 Grass had already found a way of formulating an intellectual response to the Holocaust in the texts of his Danzig Trilogy: Die Blechtrommel (1959), Katz und Maus (1961) and Hundejahre (1963).75 Remembrance for its Own Sake Grass attends to the multi-faceted duties of remembrance in his anecdotal diary of the twentieth century, Mein Jahrhundert, which contains one entry for each of the years between 1900 and 1999. Grass demonstrates both through the content of the text and through its formal composition that one purpose of paying attention to the past is to fulfil an ethical responsibility of remembrance, as an end in itself, valuable for its own sake. As Katharina Hall points out, however, the ‘semi-autobiographical’ Mein Jahrhundert is one of the texts in relation to which Grass’s sixty-year-long failure to remember truthfully his own past is particularly at odds with his literary mission.76 Remembrance of the past must be carried out as a necessary – if not sufficient – component of the responsibility of responding to the Holocaust. This kind of remembrance, like Platonic anamnesis, entails a deliberate moral choice. Grass’s recognition of remembrance as a deliberate act which is worthwhile in itself reflects the shared logic of his novelistic – if not autobiographical – prose and sacramental anamnesis, which dictates that remembrance of the Holocaust and the sacrament should be performed for their own sake. Kertész’s criticism of the commoditization of the Holocaust forms part of a similar argument. In a critical article reflecting on the idea of Auschwitz as a form of ‘intellectual property’ owned by Holocaust

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survivors he comments on what he perceives as the unfortunate tradeoff between the possibility of collective remembrance of the Holocaust and its inevitable concomitant ‘stylization’.77 For Kertész, this stylization entails the formation of ‘a moral-political ritual, complete with a new and often phony language’, or a ‘ceremonial discourse’.78 Kertész’s characterization of the unwelcome forms of speech which develop around the Holocaust as a consequence of the strongly politicized public debates, particularly in North America and Germany, regarding its memorialization and representation as art might seem to preclude any possibility of understanding of Holocaust remembrance in his novelistic texts in the ritual context of Eucharistic anamnesis. Yet my consideration of his Kaddish novella suggests how its reconfiguration of certain aspects of religious rituals of remembrance enables an approach to the literary remembrance of the Holocaust which is thereby more attentive to the problems of ritualized remembrance of the Holocaust itself. Kertész’s description of what makes good literary writing about the Holocaust suggests one way in which the consideration of ritual is relevant to his novelistic texts: the decades have taught me that the only passable route to liberation leads us through memory. But there are various ways of remembering. The artist hopes that, through a precise description, leading him once more along the pathways of death, he will finally break through to the noblest kind of liberation, to a catharsis in which he can perhaps allow his reader to partake as well.79 Kertész’s account of the act of writing in response to the Holocaust emphasizes the difficulty of transforming memories into written material. His reference to ‘various ways of remembering’ reminds us of the element of choice involved in acts of remembrance which makes anamnesis a moral act for Plato. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates describes how knowledge is attained through a combination of memory and judgement, in terms which are relevant to Kertész’s account here.80 Through the artistic standard for art responding to the Holocaust to supply ‘a precise description, leading him once more along the pathways of death’, Kertész suggests a way of avoiding the ‘ceremonial discourse’ which shapes so much of the public discussion of the Holocaust. The commitment to ‘a precise description’ implies a form of remembrance which is undertaken for its own sake, rather than for

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the sake of attracting any form of external attention. As we have seen, the moral valuation of remembrance for its own sake also informs the ritual context of memory in Judaeo-Christianity. Communal Remembrance In the essays collected in The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin suggests various ways of characterizing the differences between poetry and novelistic prose; his distinctions help to illuminate my understanding of the ways in which the memorial response to the Holocaust is structured in the respective literary genres. In each case, Bakhtin is careful to point out that these are not absolute differences, and that ‘poetic’ effects may be identified in some novelistic prose texts and vice versa. Even taking account of the flexibility of his categorizations, however, it is not possible to apply his definitions directly to the texts of the authors I consider in this book. Nonetheless, his conceptions of the different structures of address within poetry and prose provide a useful frame of reference. Bakhtin seeks to reverse the ‘separation of style and language from the question of genre’, which he identifies as the customary failing of literary analyses of novels.81 In his view the study of novelistic style has formerly tended to be ‘period-bound’ or confined to individual works rather than encompassing whole genres. Bakhtin challenges the widely held conception that novelistic language ‘is the same as practical speech for everyday life, or speech for scientific purposes, an artistically neutral means of communication’, and thereby reinforces the need for studies of the novel to focus on generically specific questions of style.82 Bakhtin’s efforts to specify the generic characteristics of the novel are centred on his notion of ‘heteroglossia’. Heteroglossia refers to the many voices which are always operational within language; this plurality finds its most apt expression in the form of the novel, which ‘permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized)’.83 So in Bakhtin’s view, the structure of address in novelistic prose entails multiple voices. Whereas in Chapter Two I characterized Celan’s and Hill’s poetry as confessional, in the sense of positing an addressee with whom it is in confessional dialogue, Grass’s and Kertész’s novelistic prose may be understood in terms of Eucharistic anamnesis partly by virtue of its communal mode of address. Bakhtin’s sense of the ‘dialogized’ utterance of novelistic prose refers to the way in which its language is always intended as

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communication. While the ‘dialogized’ heteroglossia of novelistic prose involves multiple linguistic speakers, it also refers to the ‘internal dialogism of the word’,84 in which linguistic utterance encounters and resonates with multiple other instances of utterance. Bakhtin’s view of language challenges the ideological presumption of an authoritatively meaningful ‘unitary language’ by insisting upon the diversity of meanings entailed by multiple individual utterances or ‘heteroglossia’.85 For Levinas the act of speaking to another person is the best testimony of the individual’s infinite responsibility towards the other, and for Bakhtin the act of verbal communication is the most appropriate way of doing justice to the infinite variety of linguistic meanings, and presumably thereby also to the infinite variety of those who mean. In his account of the linguistic differences between poetry and prose, poetry is generally pejoratively identified with a unified, monologic linguistic expression, whereas novelistic prose is celebrated for its capacity to contain a variety of linguistic modes. While always maintaining that the genre in which heteroglossia finds its fullest expression is the novel, Bakhtin does admit that certain sorts of poetry – what he refers to as the ‘“low” poetic genres’ of satire and comedy – can express external heteroglossia.86 Curiously he does not analyse in detail the sense of heteroglossia as ‘internal dialogism’ which would seem to be very much within the domain of poetic discourse in general. Despite the reservations concerning his classification of poetry, Bakhtin’s characterization of novelistic prose as inherently manyvoiced is helpful as a way of illustrating the communal address of Grass’s and Kertész’s prose texts. As Kertész described in his account in Kaddish of writing as a dialogue with God, or a substitute for Him, prose narratives are inherently dialogic. Unlike poetry, however, whose confessional aspect depends on its being understood as a dialogue between two individuals, prose sets out to sustain a conversation with more than a single reader at once. While Celan’s poetry is addressed to a single ‘addressable you’, Kertész describes novelistic prose as ‘a dialogue with other people’.87 This property arises as result of its construction – characterized by Bakhtin as ‘heteroglossia’ – which means that the narratorial address of prose is closer to that of communion than the private dialogue of confession. Although the addressee of prose may feel personally addressed by the text, (s)he is nonetheless part of a community of other readers, who are all also addressed by the text. In pragmatic terms, there are obviously multiple readers of nearly all published literary texts, be they poetry or prose (although equally

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pragmatically, poetry tends to be read by many fewer readers than prose), but my argument here is related to the way in which the form of the literary text sets up a particular kind of address which demands a particular kind of reading experience. The prose text bespeaks and enjoins its readers to share in the act of remembrance which it enacts, accompanying Kertész ‘along the pathways of death’. Grass’s ambitious novel Hundejahre has an ‘authors’ collective’ of three narrators corresponding to the periods before, during and after the Second World War: Herr Brauxel, Harry Liebenau and Walter Matern. Hundejahre is often noted for its remarkable prosodic heteroglossia, including its effective characterization of Nazi German, as well as its parody of Heidegger’s philosophical language.88 The narrator of Kertész’s novel Fiasko repeatedly addresses his readers using the collective first person pronoun ‘we’,89 so that the act of reading as well as that of narration becomes an inclusive, communal process where the story is always shared as ‘our story’.90 The novelistic prose texts, then, like the poetry, are always speaking to someone who may be conceived of as a substitute for an absent God, but unlike poetry, their access to multiple voices in the Bakhtinian sense of ‘heteroglossia’ enables them simultaneously to bespeak multiple addressees, in common with the communal address in the ritual liturgy of the Eucharist. Anxieties about the extent of his readership emerge in a number of Kertesz’s works. In his 1991 short story, ‘Jegyzőkönyv’, translated into German with the title ‘Protokoll’, Kertész’s narrator apostrophizes his ‘“true reader”, even if there is only a single one – and if that single person is perhaps me myself ’.91 Similar uncertainty is revealed in his diary when Kertész describes how for a long time, ‘I thought that no one was reading my things, no one knew about me’.92 In his 2002 Nobel lecture, Kertész describes his bewilderment upon receiving the prize, since he has ‘always considered writing a highly personal, private matter’.93 While these comments illustrate Kertész’s precarious status as an author in Communist Hungary and his anxieties about his work finding an understanding readership, they do not preclude the way in which his prose seeks to involve multiple addressees in the act of remembrance, which, as we have seen, is a characteristic of all good writing in response to the Holocaust for Kertész. The ambition of writing to offer something in which its readers can participate need not entail being convinced of an extensive or actual readership, or knowing anything about potential readers. As Grass remarks in a 1967 essay, ‘We know very little about the effects books have. And the

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author knows even less about where his words will land.’94 Paul Celan’s image of the poetic sending-out as a message in a bottle indicates that it is the attempt to make contact with a putative reader or readers which counts. Kertész outlines some of the difficulties with trying to imagine his readers in the Nobel lecture before concluding with the ‘obvious’ assertion that the writer can only ever write for himself.95 He continues, ‘If I had an aim at all, it was to be faithful, in language and form, to the subject at hand, and nothing more.’96 This resonates with Geoffrey Hill’s aim of ‘an extreme concentration on technical discipline’.97 Kertész and Hill’s chosen literary forms are different, yet each conceives of attention to their particular form as the best way of responding to the Holocaust and of enacting remembrance. Kertész accounts for his writing as the only way he knows how to live,98 while also reflecting upon whether artistic creativity might preclude an affirmative way of living.99 His living needs somehow to accommodate his irreconcilable experience of the Holocaust, which means negotiating the balance between remembering and forgetting, or not forgetting to remember. He describes this negotiation in the Nobel speech when he recalls how, ‘To my horror, I realized that ten years after I had returned from the Nazi concentration camps, and halfway still under the awful spell of Stalinist terror, all that remained of the whole experience were a few muddled impressions, a few anecdotes.’100 This realization prompts Kertész’s resolution to remember to remember in his prose fiction. His writing is undertaken as an act of remembrance for its own sake which, in spite of Kertész’s concern that he will be its only reader, is structured so as to be capable of involving multiple addressees in the anamnestic process. Remembrance as Actualization Eucharistic anamnesis functions like the theological concept of Vergegenwärtigung which is used to describe acts of remembrance in the Hebrew Bible (see Chapter One), since for the Christian worshippers Jesus’s actions and words are made present again. The actualizing aspect of Eucharistic remembrance finds expression in an early manifesto for writing prose fiction by Grass’s literary role model Alfred Döblin, when he describes how prose should convey something which is ‘as it is’ rather than merely constitute reported speech. Döblin’s discussion of the connections between prosodic form and function is quoted by Grass in his essay exploring the relationship

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between his own literary work and that of his predecessor.101 In a similar formulation to Kertész’s ‘precise description’, Döblin advocates ‘the greatest precision’ in prose writing. He describes how the formal nature of prose sentences, constructed of multiple clauses, enables them to negotiate the complex interconnectedness of historical circumstances. Döblin’s assertion that the finished prosodic product should seem real and present – ‘as it is’ – rather than merely reported suggests links with the Judaeo-Christian services of remembrance where the principle of Vergegenwärtigung means that remembered events are made actual again for participants rather than merely being retold. J.L. Austin’s notion of performative utterance is useful here for the way in which it helps further to elucidate the relationship I am positing between the literary remembrance of the Holocaust and Christian sacramental worship. Like Bakhtin and Levinas, Austin foregrounds the spoken utterance as the most important way of understanding how language works, because it embodies how words convey meaning between people. He identifies a category of utterances which are other than descriptive or statements of fact. Such performative utterances are made when ‘to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it’.102 Austin’s examples include the commitment to marriage, ‘I do’ (which he famously confuses with the actual words, ‘I will’), and the words uttered when naming a ship. He elaborates upon how the performative utterance depends upon its ritual context in order to be effective: ‘The uttering of the words is, indeed, usually a, or even the, leading incident in the performance of the act … the performance of which is also the object of the utterance, but it is far from being usually, even if it is ever, the sole thing necessary if the act is to be deemed to have been performed’.103 In performative utterances, then, something is done by virtue of what is said, as long as predetermined conditions are fulfilled in order that the context of what is said may be considered to be right for the action to take place. One of the preconditions for an action to be performed in this way is that the speaker of the utterance intends what is said seriously. Austin appropriates the definition of a sacrament as ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’ in the Catechism in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer in order to describe this required seriousness: ‘But we are apt to have a feeling that their [the spoken words] being serious consists in their being uttered as an outward and visible sign, for convenience or other

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record or for information, of an inward and spiritual act.’104 Austin does not acknowledge the origin of his designation in the text of his lecture. The same expression subsequently recurs in a similar context in his second lecture.105 Its use suggests a correspondence between his concept of the relationship between saying and doing in performative utterance and the relationship of words and actions in sacramental worship. Austin has already suggested the words spoken during the sacrament of marriage (as well as during the civil marriage ceremony) as an example of what he means by performative utterance, which would suggest that his concept applies also to the words spoken in other sacramental rituals. He then uses the classic description of Christian sacramental action to describe an important aspect of the character of performative utterances in general. Austin’s supposedly secular theory appears to derive from Christian sacramental theology. The link between the conceptions of memory in the Hebrew Bible as Vergegenwärtigung whereby an injunction to remember invariably means ‘remember-and-do-something-as-a-result’ and the Christian sacramental forms of remembrance derived from the New Testament, which I proposed in the first chapter, is refigured in Austin’s idea of performative utterance, where to say something in the appropriate context is also and at the same time to do that thing. In Galeerentagebuch Kertész chronicles the composition of his first novel Fateless in entries spanning more than a decade, including the reflection, ‘The text is not description, but is itself event, not explanation, but presence.’106 This formulation echoes that of Döblin/Grass that prose writing be ‘as it is’; it describes the operation of Vergegenwärtigung and is closely aligned with Austin’s idea of performative utterance. At first sight the denial of ‘description’ in this statement seems to contradict Kertész’s subsequent advocacy of ‘precise description’ in prose writing responding to the Holocaust, but in fact the sensation of being present at an ‘event’ while reading the text could not be realized without the description. The description comes to transcend itself and assume the status of an event in the act of reading. Elsewhere Kertész writes that ‘The Holocaust has never been in the past tense for me’,107 and in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he reiterates that ‘In my writings the Holocaust could never be present in the past tense’.108 Kertész’s prose writing remembers the Holocaust in an ongoing present. Kertész connects the continuous present of Auschwitz with that of Christ’s crucifixion, claiming ‘that neither the crucifixion nor Auschwitz are short-lived’.109

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For Kertész, then, form is an inseparable component of remembrance. Kertész’s most recent novel, Felszámolás (2003), translated into English as Liquidation, is concerned with the difficulties of narration per se, and particularly narration in response to the Holocaust. The prose draws attention to its own construction throughout, as the narrator rehearses the challenges presented by the form and content of his material, and yet the prosodic continuity is maintained, even at moments of profound narratorial uncertainty.110 The narrator’s prose is punctuated by extracts from the texts of a play and occasionally of poems written by a deceased friend, which often treat the same material as the prose narrative. But the narrator is searching all the while for the manuscript of a novel written by his friend, suggesting that novelistic prose is the form which comes closest to meeting the anamnestic challenge here. Referring to the inadequacy of material in other literary genres to express the author’s remembrance of the Holocaust, he describes how ‘Everything in this estate longs for the novel, the consummation, the apotheosis.’111 Kertész is committed to the novelistic form of response to the Holocaust while maintaining a necessary scepticism about the extent to which any literary response will ever be adequate. He describes how, ‘In my Diary From the Galleys, I found myself compelled to write: “The concentration camp is imaginable only and exclusively as literature, never as reality. (Not even – or rather, least of all – when we have directly experienced it.)”’112 The same idea is elaborated in Kertész’s earlier text, Ich – ein anderer.113 Literary form is integral to the task of re-imagining the concentration camps, although some forms are more suitable than others for this purpose. Kertész’s suspicion of literary forms which do not conform to his prescribed way of writing in response to the Holocaust is aired by the narrator of his short story ‘The Union Jack’. The fictional narrator shares many aspects of Kertész’s biographical particulars and experiences. The story is narrated by a Hungarian writer who no longer thinks of himself as being young, and who is reflecting in postrevolutionary Hungary on his life as a journalist in the tense and unpredictable environment of Budapest in the years following the Second World War. Much of the narration discusses the relationship between the protagonist’s experiences of life and his writing, in terms of the extent to which it was possible to make written sense of an increasingly nonsensical world. At one point in ‘The Union Jack’ the narrator catalogues his present estrangement from most types of literature, calling for,

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forms which can completely capture the experience of life (that is to say, the catastrophe), which help us to die and still leave something behind for the survivors. I have absolutely no objections to literature which is capable of such a form: but as far as I can see, only testimony is still capable of giving expression to a dumb, unarticulated life.114 Although the narrator of this text is discussing the most appropriate form of literary response to the way of life imposed by the Communist authorities in Hungary, this extract also relates to the challenge of writing about existence under other modes of totalitarianism, or, more generally, to any conditions which may be experienced as ‘the catastrophe’. Hence it can also be read as an elaboration of the position behind Kertész’s advocacy in the ‘Who Owns Auschwitz?’ essay of ‘precise description’ as the most appropriate way of formulating a literary response to the Holocaust. According to the identifiably Kertészian narrator of ‘The Union Jack’, the afflatus of literary language is akin to a solvent which has an irreversibly corrosive effect upon other forms of linguistic expression. The speaker recommends working at a different kind of form which would enable writing fully to grasp the catastrophic aspects of human experience. In terms which precisely encapsulate the function of various kinds of liturgical worship in both Judaism and Christianity, the speaker adds that this form will aid both the dead and the living, or, more accurately, the survivors. Existing forms which might apply here include the Jewish Kaddish prayer and various Christian sacraments, including confession and the Eucharist, all of which might form part of a spiritual preparation for death, as well as a means of orientation in life for those who have survived. ‘Survivors’ here refers to any people who live with the experience or knowledge of a prior catastrophe. As the narrator of Kertész’s Liquidation remarks, recalling the motivations for writing articulated by Paul Celan and Geoffrey Hill and Adorno’s discussion in Negative Dialectics, ‘He who remains alive is always guilty.’115 The link between the various possible senses of guilt for having survived and the attitude of the Kertészian narrator in ‘The Union Jack’ is elucidated in the narrator’s suggestion that testimony, or bearing witness, is the only literary form which is capable of meeting the requirements of a written response to catastrophe. This echoes Elie Wiesel’s famous declaration that testimony is the defining literary genre of the twentieth century. Here, testimony is the mode within which the ‘precise description’ advocated in Kertész’s earlier essay should occur.

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Günter Grass shares both Kertész’s scepticism of much contemporary literature and his value of the idea of literature as witnessing. As Katharina Hall remarks, however, Grass’s own status as a witness invoked in the title of his 1973 essay ‘Looking back on The Tin Drum – or the author as questionable witness’ acquires ‘a new piquancy’ following his belated disclosure of his membership of the Waffen-SS.116 In one of the interviews given during an extended visit to India in 1986–87 Grass characterizes what for him, in contrast with the prevalent literary malaise, is the ideal mode of literary production: ‘every writer is a product of his time. He is an eyewitness to his time. He records all the changes in his time while he himself is changing.’117 Grass advocates the writer’s role as an eyewitness to contemporary events alongside that of fulfilling the ethical duty of responding to the past in acts of remembrance. These two reasons for writing are complementary. Grass is also alert to the difficulties bound up with such acts of witnessing. In Mein Jahrhundert the series of diary entries for the years of the Second World War are narrated by journalists who worked in Germany during the war. In the entry for 1945, a journalist describes the difficulties he had in reporting people’s experiences during the final months of the war. Even if the German media had been disposed to publish accounts of the widespread suffering at that time, including the hardship of civilians as well as the experiences of those who survived the concentration camps, the journalist describes how ‘I had not learned how to describe these things. I had no words for them. So I learned to be silent.’118 Grass’s literary texts, including Mein Jahrhundert, experiment with forms through which they can respond to this misery other than by falling silent. Similarly, life and its narration are inseparable for the narrator of Kertész’s ‘The Union Jack’,119 and in Liquidation, truly unbearable lives are also ‘lives which have become unnarratable’.120 This concern about the connection between experience and narration, as mediated by memory and literary form, informs all of Kertész’s and Grass’s writing. In the reflections on the role of the writer in Ich – ein anderer we find one of Kertész’s most explicit textual references to the sacrament of the Eucharist. Kertész is considering, as he often does, the question of to whom mankind is accountable for its conduct. He considers the issue of accountability in the context of Camus’s designation of happiness as a duty and sets out one of the inherent paradoxes of his literary work. His commitment to what he has elsewhere termed the ‘precise description’ of human experience, from which he derives fulfilment and satisfaction as a writer, necessarily involves dwelling on the conditions of human misery, such as those of the Holocaust. Thus

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Kertész’s happiness in some sense depends upon his and others’ former unhappiness. Kertész does not apologize for this situation, however, but justifies it by means of an analogy with the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist: ‘every meaningful undertaking demands that you sacrifice yourself, that people eat of your body and drink of your blood ...’ 121 He maintains that the paradoxical circumstances of his literary creation are like those of the celebration of Christian salvation, in which Christ’s gift of salvation, made possible only by his own selfsacrifice on the cross, is commemorated in the sacramental communion with his body and blood. Significantly, Kertész describes his prose writing as a personal dedication to a Eucharistic form of self-sacrifice. When considered in conjunction with those of his statements regarding his writing’s commitment to remembrance, already discussed above, Kertész effectively characterizes his own writing in terms of the anamnestic model of remembrance which I am claiming is so relevant for his and Grass’s texts. Kertész goes further in his attention to the ethical implications of assuming the position of ‘the self-justifying moralist’,122 within which the act of writing is always justified within its own, self-fulfilling terms. Kertész’s self-characterization is reminiscent of Salman Rushdie’s description of the logic of Grass’s work as inseparable from his experience of migration, whereby, ‘The migrant intellect roots itself in itself, in its own capacity for imagining and re-imagining the world’.123 Kertész and Grass’s different experiences of terror and profound social and political upheaval are at the root of their parallel turn to and self-grounding in the literary form of novelistic prose, even while they remain sceptical of it. In circumstances of personal uncertainty, the narrator of Liquidation reflects ‘that only literature is in a position to restore the continuity, the unbrokenness of our lives’.124 Yet referring to Hannah Arendt’s description of all her writing as being an attempt at understanding, Kertész voices concerns about the way in which understanding something – which might include formulating a continuous literary representation of that thing – entails taking possession of it. These concerns may by implication be extended to Kertész’s conception of writing as remembrance. Kertész worries that the literary act of remembrance may involve an inappropriate sense of power and ownership over the object of remembrance. He asks, ‘Is there a way of understanding through which I do not seek to take ownership, to take possession?’125 The literary reconfiguration of the communal, actualizing address of Eucharistic anamnesis offers one such way of understanding and

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remembering. In this context remembrance is not justified or owned by the individual person remembering, but by the collective performance of the act of remembrance itself, which is always conceived as an address towards others or, in Levinas’s terms, an act of ‘saying in relation to’. While the Christian Eucharist is dedicated to God, neither Kertész nor Grass directly acknowledges God either as an object of devotion or as a source of accountability. For them, God is both absent, in the post-structuralist, counter-theological sense that cannot countenance transcendent meaning after the Holocaust, and hypothetically present, as, with varying motivations and degrees of faith, He is addressed by the characters in their novels. Kertész and Grass do not straightforwardly restore ‘the metaphysics of presence’, as George Steiner seeks to do – although he knows it cannot be straightforward – in his plea for a new approach to art-works in which individual judgement is given primacy over unreflecting dependence on the parasitic culture industry.126 The simultaneous absence and hypothetical presence of God in their texts preserves and is preserved by the multiplicity of perspectives – in the Bakhtinian sense of heteroglossia – which ensures that their work avoids the kind of dogmatic claims to authority or exclusive comprehension which it was written in order to resist. Nonetheless, the communal act of remembrance of the Holocaust enjoined in their prose fiction proceeds in the performative manner of the Christian sacrament. God may not be there, but for Kertész human action is legitimated by conducting oneself as though He might be, which includes remembering to remember those who were murdered during the Holocaust. This course of action leads to a form of remembrance which, via its simultaneous appeal to multiple readers and its intentional commitment to ‘precise description’ in written prose, reconfigures the address of Eucharistic anamnesis in the context of an absent God, and has the capacity, in Levinas’s sense of an act of saying addressed towards infinite otherness, to bring about a corresponding ethical reorientation of intersubjective relationships. Kaddish An essential point of reference for any examination of the significance of Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance for the prose fiction of two authors who by turns explicitly distance themselves from or are ambiguous about their adherence to a particular faith,127 would seem

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to be the most prominent allusion by either of them to a form of worship. This occurs in the title of Kertész’s 1990 novella, Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért. This text was first translated into English by Christopher C. and Katharina M. Wilson as Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1997). A subsequent English translation by Tim Wilkinson renders the title Kaddish for an Unborn Child (2004). The novella is concerned with the interconnectedness of ideas of death and of never having been born. Kertész repeatedly cites consciousness of death as the principal stimulus for artistic creation in Galeerentagebuch128 and in Ich – ein anderer.129 Similarly, Kertész characterizes all his best writing as being ‘through memory. … leading … once more along the pathways of death’.130 As the prayer in the Jewish liturgy which is used in rituals of mourning, the Kaddish is closely linked with consciousness of death, which makes it an apt formal inspiration for Kertész’s literary text. Kertész describes in Ich – ein anderer how the first sentences of Kaddish were written, as the novella itself implies, when the author was at a writer’s retreat.131 At this time, Kertész had just finished work on a translation of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy which makes Silenus’s bleak insights into human existence and death particularly relevant here. Kertész quotes Silenus’s words to King Midas later in Ich – ein anderer: ‘“the best thing for you would be never to have been born, to be nothing and nobody. But the second best would be for you to die as soon as possible.”’132 Kertész’s narrator’s not-born child is the result of his decision to take literally the first part of Silenus’s advice. Kaddish for a Child Not Born explores the relationship between ‘the pathways of death’ opened up by the Holocaust and the narrator’s decision not to father children. In the Jewish ritual of mourning, the Kaddish is recited as part of the memorialization of the dead. While the content of the Kaddish in most of its variations does not promote remembrance of the dead, except for a single reference in the Kaddish of Renewal, the ritual act of reciting the prayer in the context of mourning establishes this connection. The title of Kertész’s text invokes this ritual context, while belonging to a prose narrative formulated around his prescription of ‘precise description’. When literary critics discuss instances of the Kaddish prayer in literary responses to the Holocaust, they sometimes refer to it reductively as the Jewish ‘prayer for the dead’.133 While the Kaddish is now primarily known for its role in Jewish rites of mourning,134 its significance extends beyond this function. Various accounts of the origins of the Kaddish and of the liturgical developments which have

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led to its different forms and their current usage are provided by Ismar Elbogen, A.Z. Idelsohn and Stefan C. Reif. Elbogen notes that ‘The nucleus of the Kaddish is the blessing … “May His great name be blessed forever and ever”’, and remarks on the well-known similarity in this and other respects between the Kaddish and the Christian Lord’s Prayer.135 The orphan’s or mourner’s Kaddish is what is most commonly meant when the word ‘Kaddish’ is used on its own. Mourner’s Kaddish is traditionally recited by the eldest son of the deceased for eleven months following the death at the conclusion of the synagogue service, and then at each subsequent anniversary of the death.136 The Kaddish of Renewal is a version of the prayer recited by mourners at funerals after the burial. Idelsohn notes that the Kaddish of Renewal is the only one to contain any reference to the dead. The reference comes in the opening lines of the first verse: ‘May His great Name be magnified and sanctified in the world that is to be created anew, where He will quicken the dead, and raise them up unto life eternal.’137 The customary qualification of references to the Mourner’s Kaddish by non-Jewish commentators as ‘the Jewish prayer for the dead’ is thus misleading. Although the Mourner’s Kaddish is recited ‘for the dead’ in its liturgical usage, to call it ‘the Jewish prayer for the dead’ excludes the actual content of the prayer, praising God and interceding for the living. The single intercession for the dead in the Kaddish of Renewal in a prayer which otherwise focuses on blessing and praising God has generated extensive discussion among theologians about how the generic Kaddish prayer came to be associated with mourning. E.W.G. Masterman attributes a salvational function to the recitation of Kaddish by those who out-live the dead, in which the recitation has a ritual significance which is more important than any thematic link between the Kaddish and the dead.138 Elbogen offers various reasons for the Kaddish’s connection with mourning: It was considered to be appropriate for mourning ceremonies because of the eschatological petition at its beginning; the sanctification of the name of God and the coming of God’s kingdom are intimately connected, especially in the prophet Ezekiel, with resurrection; and doubtless the word consolations was understood as relating to the comforting of mourners.139 Reif adheres to a pragmatic account of the evolution of the mourner’s Kaddish out of the former requirement for the mourner to lead the

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prayers at the Saturday synagogue service marking the end of the Sabbath. This expectation was gradually reduced to the requirement to say Kaddish after the service.140 Idelsohn largely paraphrases Elbogen’s account here, although he does expand on the far-reaching significance which the Kaddish has within Judaism, particularly as a consequence of the appropriation of the general form of the prayer for the particular circumstances of mourning.141 The hope of divine future redemption in the Kaddish is predicated upon an implicit remembrance of God’s saving acts in the past: if God has acted to save Israel in the past, then He is capable of further salvational intervention. Although this view of a God who acts in history is one of the fundamental challenges to Jewish theology after the Holocaust,142 as I established in the consideration of religious ritual and remembrance in Chapter One, ritualized remembrance provides a form for the relation of traumatic past events within the structure of Vergegenwärtigung, which continues to function as a model for desanctified forms of remembrance after the Holocaust. Kertész’s novella draws on various senses of the Kaddish prayer as it is used in the Jewish liturgical tradition. On the one hand, Kertész’s text enacts rites of mourning for the narrator’s never-to-be-born children, always in the context of the Holocaust which is part of the reason for his refusal to father children. In this sense, Kertész’s text could be seen to correspond to the functions of the Kaddish of Renewal, as well as to the extended recitation of the Mourner’s Kaddish, although in his text the roles of mourner and mourned are reversed and distorted as the potential parent recites the prayer in relation to a not-born child. Another prominent motif of Kaddish, which is in some ways related to its mourning aspect, is its reflection upon a caring action performed in relation to the narrator by a figure known as the Professor, during one of the death marches at the end of the Second World War. This man was in possession of a double food ration, including the portion due to the narrator who was ill and unable to walk. Against the narrator’s expectations, the Professor gives this second portion to him: ‘it seems that my total surprise screamed unabashedly from my face, because as he quickly headed back – if they didn’t find him in his place they’d kill him – he replied with recognizable disgust on his moribund face: “Well, what did you expect…?”’143 The narrator is subsequently haunted by the Professor’s disgust and reflects repeatedly on the man’s possible motivations for his action.144 These reflections sometimes assume a theological character; they consider man’s place in the world and the nature of

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his moral obligations and are concerned with the relationship between freedom and necessity, including the possibility of a divine moral arbiter. So, while the content of Kertész’s prose does not specifically resemble the praise and thanksgiving of the Kaddish text, it both reconfigures the Kaddish’s context of ritual remembrance and rehearses the related theme of the possibility of human redemption, partly determined by one’s actions towards others. The conspicuous place of the name of the well-known Jewish prayer in the novella’s title is interesting in the light of the narrator’s fraught relationship to his Jewish identity. The narrator recounts an episode which becomes his defining encounter with Judaism, when, during a stay with some relatives as a child, he opens a bedroom door and sees ‘a bald woman in a red gown in front of a mirror’.145 For the young boy the vision is a ‘lifelong shock’ which he initially resists accepting as bearing any relation to his own identity. For the older narrator, this image of the bald woman is subsequently inextricably part of what it means to be Jewish. The narrator goes on to discover his Jewishness within the experience of persecution and deportation to Auschwitz. Only after the Holocaust does he fully come to understand one fatal way of defining what it means to be Jewish, and come to identify himself with the sight of the woman: ‘I suddenly found myself understanding who I was: a bald woman in a red gown in front of a mirror’.146 The phrase recurs throughout the novella as part of the narrator’s ongoing struggle with his Jewishness.147 It informs the narrator’s lamentation for his unborn children, since his unwillingness to father children is partly an unwillingness to father Jewish children, who will then be bound to suffer for an identity they did not choose. In an account of a conversation with his wife in which he explains this aspect of his decision, the narrator recounts: In that respect, I said, I would have to walk with lowered head before the child – and you – because I couldn’t give the child – or you – anything: no explanation, no faith, no ammunition, for my Jewishness means nothing to me or, more precisely, it means nothing as Jewishness, abstractly speaking; as experience it means everything, as Jewishness it means: a bald woman in a red robe in front of the mirror; as experience it means my life or rather my survival, a spiritual form of existence which I live and which I maintain and which suffices for me; I am perfectly content with this much; the question is, though, whether or not he/she/you would be content with it.148

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It is the narrator’s concrete experience of Jewishness as a potential death sentence, rather than his abstract sense of Jewishness as the memory of a frightening and abhorrent image, which is connected with his decision not to father children. This decision is the stimulus for the Kaddish prayer, which is, in turn, a Jewish way of orienting himself in relation to his not-born children and to a Jewish identity which is both meaningless and all too meaningful. Kertész’s novel Fateless contains an episode involving the Kaddish prayer which is also bound up with the question of what it means to be Jewish. While the narrator, György Koves, is imprisoned in the Zeitz concentration camp a group of prisoners attempt to escape and are executed in a public hanging. A rabbi prisoner begins to recite the Kaddish prayer and other prisoners join in: ‘Jiskadal, vöjiskadal’, was intoned repeatedly, and even I knew that this was the so-called Kaddish, the prayer of Jews to honour their dead. Possibly this, too, was just simply an aspect of stubbornness, a final and perhaps – I had to admit – somewhat forced one because it was pretailored, predesigned, and useless (because, after all, nothing had changed up front, and except for the few, final struggles of the ones hanging, nothing had moved, nothing was affected by these words). Yet I somehow understood the emotion with which the rabbi’s face seemed to dissolve and the force by which even his nostrils trembled in such a strange way … And indeed, at that moment and for the first time (I can’t explain why), I too felt a sense of loss, even a little envy. This was the first time I regretted a little that I wasn’t able – if only for a few phrases – to pray in the language of the Jews.149 As in the novella, the narrator of Fateless struggles to make sense of his own Jewishness. Koves’ imprisonment in the concentration camp as a Jew depends upon an identity assigned to him by others which is not part of how he defines himself. He recognizes the Kaddish prayer and describes his conflicting attitudes towards it as a combination of scepticism regarding the prayer’s purpose and regret that he is unable to participate in the act of worship. Sara D. Cohen omits any reference to this episode in her survey of Koves’ encounters with religious Jews in Fateless, perhaps because it challenges her contention that none of Kertész’s protagonists are able to identify with any aspect of Jewish belief. 150 Similarly, in her analysis of Koves’ alienation from Jewish tradition Adrienne Kertzer does not refer to his desire to participate

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in the prayer.151 In fact, the Kaddish functions as a marker of Jewishness in the novel which includes and excludes the narrator at the same time. The Jewish theologian Richard Rubenstein’s 1955 essay, ‘After Auschwitz’, considers the Jewish faith’s need to respond to the events of the Holocaust and offers a psychological assessment of the human need for religious ritual: ‘In the time of the death of God, I expect we need rituals to dramatize and celebrate the crises of life more than ever’.152 Rubenstein’s project of accounting for God after the death of God is like Kertész’s idea of choosing to live as though there were a God, in a world without God. This explains the narrator’s longing to join in the recital of the Kaddish in Fateless and is the way in which the Kaddish prayer functions in the novella. Kertész has described the modern concern about the existence of God as a grammatical problem.153 The form of the Kaddish is invoked in his novella as a kind of grammatical solution: a parsing which enables Kertész’s narrator to orient himself in the world. The Kaddish is a ritual speech act which, through its place in Jewish rituals of mourning, allows the narrator to position himself in relation to the children he will never have. In grammatical terms, it is a way of situating personal pronouns in relation to one another: the first person ‘I’ who speaks the prayer and the second person ‘you’ in respect of whose death the prayer is spoken are reconciled with one another before the third person ‘He’, who is the God to whom the praise and thanksgiving in the prayer are dedicated. This posited God is similar to Rubenstein’s conception of God after Auschwitz; such a God is a human construct who exists in order that we may answer the question as to ‘Who sees through us?’, as posed by Kertész in ‘The Union Jack’. The grammatical orientation between the narrator and his unborn child is negotiated in the recurring phrase, ‘my existence in the context of your potentiality’.154 The novella is an account of how this decision to remain childless came about, and of the narrator’s subsequent life, lived in relation to a child which has never been born and in remembrance of the circumstances of the Holocaust. It is the narrator’s experience of the Holocaust which determines that the addressed ‘you’, as well as the divine ‘He’ of the Kaddish remain grammatical constructions rather than fully realized – or born – beings. Both the orientation and the remembrance enacted in the narration are made possible by the ritual context associated with the Kaddish prayer. What then is the connection between the Kaddish and the sacrament of the Eucharist? How can it be maintained that Kertész’s

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Kaddish novella, with its conspicuous relation to the context of the Jewish prayer, also operates according to a logic of Eucharistic anamnesis? Kertész himself provides us with an answer to this question, towards the end of Ich – ein anderer. Kertész is in Jerusalem in 1995 and is prompted to reflect upon the difficult relationship between Judaism and Christianity: ‘With Christ’s death there was a terrible break in the ethical structure that – if you can put it like this – constitutes the supporting pillar of human spiritual history. What caused the break? That the fathers condemned their children to death. No one has ever got over that.’155 Here, Kertész describes the death of Christ, which is remembered in the sacrament of the Eucharist, in terms which relate to his adaptation of the Kaddish prayer in Kaddish for a Child Not Born. Kertész characterizes the Christian sacrifice as the death sentence imposed by a father on his son. Similarly, Kertész’s narrator in Kaddish denies his potential children the chance of life – of ever being born – and adopts the prayer used in Jewish rites of mourning as the formal context through which to explore his ‘existence in the context of your potentiality’, which seals their fate not only as never-to-be born, but also as dead objects of mourning. Kertész’s interpretation of the death of Christ, whose life and death are celebrated in the Eucharist, also incorporates the Holocaust, the context for the non-birth of the narrator’s children in Kaddish: You could draw a line from Christ to Auschwitz, but it was only possible to entertain such an idea for a moment, and only in order to fathom the bottomless depths of human history, the extraordinary activity of life, which conceals itself as reality, the creativity and destruction which are continually at work. According to this conception Jesus is not the son of God, but the son of the father.156 The Holocaust, exemplified by Auschwitz, where the Kaddish prayer was recited by Jews even as they entered the gas chambers, is thus, according to the interpretation which Kertész briefly allows himself, also to be viewed in the context of Christ’s death. Christians subsequently perceived Christ’s death as a Jewish crime which became the foundation for Christian anti-Semitism, legitimating centuries of persecution of the Jews which culminated in genocide at Auschwitz. So the Kaddish prayer, in its capacity to express Jewish suffering in connection with rites of mourning, can be viewed in relation to Christ’s death, which is seen to have a causal connection with the

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Holocaust, the most extreme historical instance of Jewish suffering and death. The non-existence of the children of Kertész’s narrator in Kaddish is thus connected, via the narrator’s experience of the Holocaust, to the death of Christ which is commemorated in the Eucharist. This is not to say that remembrance of the not-born children entails remembrance of Christ’s death, but that the context in which the remembrance occurs is cognizant of the context of the Christian death which is also the object of remembrance in the Eucharistic sacrament. Kertész effectively asks, like Celan in his poem ‘Tenebrae’, how the Christian Eucharist may be celebrated without also remembering the death of the Jews who died in the Holocaust. In theological terms, this would mean asking how the anamnestic command during the Eucharist issued by a named Jewish figure and forming the central tenet of the Christian faith, to ‘Do this in remembrance of me’, can now be carried out without also entailing the recital of the Kaddish for the remembrance of the unnamed Jewish dead. Kertész’s position echoes that of Johann Baptist Metz who has said, ‘We can pray after Auschwitz because people also prayed in Auschwitz.’157 This pronouncement is Metz’s response to the question of whether, drawing on Adorno’s dictum about poetry after Auschwitz, Christians can still say prayers after Auschwitz. Metz characterizes Adorno’s dictum as exaggerated and contrasts it with his own pronouncement. In so doing, Metz fails to understand that Adorno’s logic in fact prefigures his own. In Adorno’s qualification of his famous statement, he explains his desire not to condemn all poetry after Auschwitz, but rather for all subsequent poetry to be written in response to the knowledge that Auschwitz has been, or for poetry that takes Auschwitz into account. Adorno rejects any poetry that tries to be ‘after Auschwitz’ in the sense of forming a radical break with Auschwitz, which is to say any poetry that deems it unnecessary to take Auschwitz into account. Similarly, Metz does not banish all prayer, but advocates only prayer which follows the prayers uttered in Auschwitz. Like Kertész, Metz connects the tradition of Christian worship with Jewish suffering, and as with Kertész, Metz’s version of the Eucharistic prayer of remembrance must include the Kaddish. Anamnesis in Danzig Grass’s first novel, Die Blechtrommel, does not refer to Jewish worship, although its considerable thematic engagement with Roman

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Catholicism generally, and the sacraments of confession and the Eucharist in particular, occasionally involves the association of Christian remembrance and Jewish suffering during the Holocaust that we find in Kertész’s novella. Grass has described how his conception of the character of Oskar Matzerath developed out of an earlier poem about a stylite saint, whose extraordinarily elevated view of the world was the inspiration for Oskar’s arrested development: ‘Oskar Matzerath is, if you like, a stylite saint in reverse’.158 This comment speaks both to the diminutive Oskar’s inflated sense of self-worth, as well as his devastating sense of the sacrilegious, born, paradoxically, of his long association with faith. Oskar’s ambivalent and complex relationship to Christianity is developed over the course of numerous visits to a Roman Catholic church in the Danzig suburb of Langfuhr, where he accompanies his mother to confession. Grass’s own ambivalence towards Roman Catholicism is clear from his account of a visit to the model for this fictional church during a research trip to Gdansk in 1958: ‘I also visited the Church of the Sacred Heart again (on Oscar’s advice): the perpetual Catholic stench’.159 Oskar is similarly affected by what he identifies as the characteristic odour of Catholic churches.160 This familiar smell is part of a life-long connection with the Roman Catholic faith which begins with his surreal memory of his own baptism, so that, ‘I was irrevocably, if unavailingly, baptized as a Catholic’.161 Oskar’s sense of his Catholic identity manifests itself in increasingly extreme ways. There are numerous instances of his self-identification with Jesus Christ and he eventually comes to regard himself as Christ’s successor.162 After an earlier failed attempt, Oskar successfully incites a statue of the infant Jesus to perform ‘miraculously’ on his tin drum. Oskar goes on to lead a gang of youthful criminals who call him Jesus and are finally disbanded when they ransack the church and carry out a perverse mass, orchestrated by Oskar, who is substituted for the statue of Jesus in the desecrated tableau. In the concluding chapter of Die Blechtrommel, the 30-year-old Oskar repeatedly recalls the 30-year-old Jesus’s gathering of his disciples.163 The sacraments serve as structuring principles in Oskar’s life; he defines himself and others by turns either according to or against various sacramental ideas. Oskar’s birth is attended by a moth whose rhythmic fluttering becomes the model for his subsequent drumming activity. He describes the moth as being engaged in a kind of confessional dialogue with the light bulb which is ‘certainly the moth’s final confession’.164 Oskar’s entire narration of Die Blechtrommel may

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be interpreted as an extended act of confession. In his analysis of Grass’s subsequent Danzig novel Hundejahre which could also be applied to Die Blechtrommel, Scott H. Abbott describes the narrators’ accounts as ‘confessions of misled, defensive and representative minds’.165 This concurs with Grass’s own account of the inhabitants of the lost Danzig of his childhood in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.166 Grass’s narratives consistently associate the delusions of National Socialism with those of Roman Catholicism, and the characters are rarely permitted to free themselves from either set of beliefs. Oskar’s account of his mother’s death includes reference to her having received ‘the last rites’ in time.167 Thoughts of the sacraments also accompany more mundane activities: I often caught myself providing commentaries on the mass in the most banal of circumstances, such as while cleaning my teeth or even during a bowel movement: in the Holy Mass the shedding of Christ’s blood is repeated anew so that you may be purified, that is the communion cup of his blood, the wine really and truly, as often as Christ’s blood is shed, Christ’s true blood is present, through the contemplation of the holy blood, the soul is sprinkled with Christ’s blood, the precious blood, washed with blood, at the consecration the blood flows, the blood-spotted body, the voice of Christ’s blood penetrates the skies, Christ’s blood spreads a pleasant odour before God’s countenance.168 Oskar’s customized commentary on the Eucharistic office while cleaning his teeth or going to the toilet is a measure of the influence Roman Catholicism exerts upon him, as well as his uncertainty about its place in his life. As the frequent mention of the sacraments in the text of his narrative demonstrates, Oskar has incorporated the Christian perspective into his understanding of the world, but in so doing, has often radically modified and subverted Christian teaching. His life is indeed lived according to a version of the principle of the imitatio Christi, but Oskar’s perverse misinterpretation of this concept means that he substitutes himself for the messiah and submits to delusions of his own divinity, which he construes as a license to exert criminal influence over others. Oskar’s acute awareness of the anamnestic aspect of the Eucharist is evident even in his mangled version of the Eucharistic prayer, quoted above. His reference to the renewed presence of the Christian sacrifice at each celebration of the Mass uses the sacramentally significant word

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‘present’ (‘vorhanden’). I described above the importance of the idea of presence in Alfred Döblin’s prescription for the textual operation of prose writing, as quoted by Grass, in his demand that prose should convey something ‘as it is’. One of the ways in which the novelistic prose of Die Blechtrommel establishes a present relation to the narrative events, including those involving aspects of sacramental worship and the Nazi persecution of the Jews, is in the extensive use of imagery to suggest the immediacy of sensory perception so that narrative experiences are ‘as they are’ for the reader. Oskar’s verbal reference to presence in relation to Eucharistic anamnesis serves paradoxically to emphasize the emptiness of his religious devotion, however. Whereas the sense of God’s absence leads Kertész – and many of his narrators – to the formulation for living life as if God were there, the presence of absence in Grass’s Danzig texts, as has widely been noted, is more commonly figured in blasphemous terms.169 The Eucharistic sacrament features extensively in Grass’s second Danzig narrative, the novella Katz und Maus (1961) (Cat and Mouse). The narrator, Pilenz, serves as an altar boy at the early morning Masses attended by his classmate Joachim Mahlke, ‘a praying, then communion-taking grammar school pupil’,170 who is the subject of his continuous speculation. The reader intuits a sense of chronology in the otherwise confusing passage of narrative time through the characters’ repeated presence at or absence from these services. The architecture and atmosphere of the ‘Marienkapelle’ where the services in Katz und Maus are conducted are contrasted with those of the more distant Church of the Sacred Heart that features in Die Blechtrommel, shortly before Oskar Matzerath makes his own brief appearance in the novella.171 The narrative is punctuated with descriptions of the Roman Catholic Masses172 in which Pilenz’s devotion to God is progressively supplanted by devotion to Mahlke.173 One account of the Communion service recounts how the altar boys, with the exception of Pilenz, habitually interrupt the liturgical text with the exchange of statistics on battleships: Introibo ad altare Dei – when was the cruiser ‘Eritrea’ launched? – Thirty-six. Special features? – Ad Deum, qui laetificat juventutem meam. – Only Italian cruiser for East Africa. Displacement? – Deus fortitudo mea – 2172 tons. Speed? – Et introibo ad altare Dei – Don’t know. Armament? – Sicut erat in principio – six 150 mm guns, four 76 mm...No! – et nunc et semper – Right. Name the German artillery training ships. – et in saecula saeculorum, Amen. – ‘Brummer’ and ‘Bremse’.174

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In this comic account of childish irreverence in which facts about battleships are intermingled with the servers’ liturgical responses, Grass literally connects the Eucharistic ritual with the remembrance of the Second World War. For the adult Pilenz, remembrance of the past necessarily involves the anamnestic ritual of the Eucharist which exerted a formative influence over his childhood and adolescence and, as such, is implicated in the context as well as the texture of his wartime memories. Katz und Maus consists of Pilenz’s repetitive yet partial memories which are echoed in his inattentive yet frequent attendance at the Eucharistic rite. The Holocaust is not explicitly remembered in the text of the novella, however. The only possible allusions to the Holocaust consist of two passing references to the Stutthof concentration camp, although it is not referred to as a place where Jews are imprisoned and murdered,175 and the ‘Jews like the ones from Der Stürmer’ drawn by a fellow pupil of the narrator.176 The conspicuous absence of the Holocaust in a text about the German experience of the Second World War which is so extensively concerned with the Eucharistic ritual might be interpreted as a comment by Grass on the complicity of the Christian Church in the Nazi persecution and murder of the Jews. Grass’s text demonstrates how Christian worship continues while ignoring Jewish suffering and how the Eucharistic anamnesis of Jesus’ crucifixion can all too easily proceed – in line with Kertész and Metz’s fears discussed above – without any accompanying memory of Jewish deaths during the Holocaust. The simultaneity of Christian worship and Jewish suffering during the Holocaust is emphasized in those passages of Die Blechtrommel which are concerned with the Nazi persecution and murder of the Jews. The chapter which concludes the first book of Die Blechtrommel is entitled ‘Faith Hope Love’ and explicitly combines remembrance of events which formed part of the Holocaust with a consideration of the Christian values which inform the sacrament of the Eucharist. The first part of the chapter offers many textual versions of the same event, in which one of Oskar’s neighbours, Herr Meyn, beats his cats to death and is consequently barred from his position as a trumpeter in the music corps of the Nazi Storm Troopers cavalry. The tale is reiterated, with varying explanations or justifications for Meyn’s actions being proposed each time. This episode is subsequently linked to an account of the events of the so-called ‘Kristallnacht’ on 9–10 November 1938, in which Meyn participates, ‘especially courageously’.177 Oskar witnesses the ransacking of Sigismund Markus’s toyshop, and discovers that the man who had so admired his mother has committed suicide. Following his visit to Markus’s shop, and in the midst of the criminal chaos being

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perpetrated against Danzig’s Jews, Oskar encounters a group of Christians holding a banner bearing the phrase, ‘Faith – Hope – Love’. These words, as the text explains, are taken from Chapter 13 of the First Letter to Corinthians in the New Testament.178 The three words precipitate a poetic outburst from Oskar. The narrative thus explicitly juxtaposes remembrance of the Nazi persecution of the Jews with reflection upon the values which underpin the anamnestic Christian sacrament of the Eucharist. This episode in Grass’s Blechtrommel provides a vivid illustration of the Christian complicity in the Nazi persecution of the Jews which is addressed in Kertész’s Kaddish as well as being a theme of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: ‘Auschwitz occurred in a Christian cultural environment’.179 Oskar Matzerath’s arrested development in Die Blechtrommel means he is frequently a spectator of rather than a participant in the events around him. Consequently, in his subsequent narrative account of those events he is more inclined to recount them for their own sake than for the sake of illustrating his relationship to them. His unconventional physical and psychological perspective means that he inhabits the world in a way which is both distanced from and peculiarly close to what goes on. Oskar’s carefully crafted and maintained distance from the adult world of suburban Danzig – which is also a faux-naif means of intimate proximity and insight into that world – nonetheless means that events are recalled with a certain quality of anamnestic detachment which at least gives the impression of privileging the circumstances of the event over the perspective or motivations of the person remembering it. His narrative style conveys both the sense of estrangement from the world commensurate with his younger self, and the precocious knowingness of that early perspective, overlaid by the ongoing combination of estrangement and knowingness of his 30-year-old narrating self. Oskar’s account of his parents’ and neighbours’ social and romantic interactions and NSDAP rallies on Sunday mornings render these events surreal because of his paradoxical attitude of knowing incomprehension. This duality is replicated in his situation in the care institution, where his life is both apart from and a critical part of other people’s lives. At the beginning of Die Blechtrommel, when Oskar is outlining the circumstances in which he lives – and writes – in the care institution, he describes his aim of exercising his ‘hopefully accurate memory’ through the act of writing.180 Part of the stated aim of the narrative of Grass’s protagonist, then, is that of remembrance for its own sake: to show what he is capable of remembering. This concurs with Grass’s

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account of his literary stance in response to the Holocaust, in his 1999 Nobel Prize speech, where he describes how writing had to become memory.181 A consequence of Oskar’s narrative perspective is that his account of events can often seem unfeasibly neutral. His description of Herr Fajngold, a Jewish survivor of Treblinka who takes possession of the Matzerath family’s grocery shop towards the end of the war, includes neither the descriptions ‘Jewish’ nor ‘survivor’.182 Oskar’s supposed ‘innocence’ entails a blithe oblivion to the implications of National Socialist politics, beyond the immediate ways in which they touch his life and those of his family and neighbours. As such, Oskar describes not a national policy of euthanasia towards mentally and physically disabled people, but rather a series of approaches to his parents from the ministry of health, suggesting that Oskar is committed to institutional care.183 Oskar’s account of Herr Fajngold’s murdered family proceeds in similarly casual terms, although in this case the absence of any moral outrage on Oskar’s part is even more noticeable, since whether or not Oskar is aware of a national campaign of persecution and murder directed towards particular social groups, the knowledge of one such case ought to be sufficient cause for horror and indignation. This kind of presentation of experiences such as those of Herr Fajngold, without narratorial comment, actively involves the reader in the remembrance of the Holocaust. The reader is required to supply the contextual knowledge which is lacking in Grass’s narrator’s account. Through Oskar’s seemingly impartial account of Herr Fajngold’s dead family, the reader participates in the remembrance of others who died in the Holocaust. So, despite its frequent classification as ‘free from any moralization’,184 Oskar’s ‘morally evasive’185 narration in Die Blechtrommel nonetheless fulfils a moral purpose. Oskar’s narratorial stance is only ‘seemingly amoral’.186 W.G. Cunliffe explains that ‘For all its grotesqueness, Grass’ neutral approach to human activities eliminates certain distortions’, such as the glorification of National Socialism.187 Hanspeter Brode describes how the childlike narratorial perspectives frequently adopted by Grass in his Danzig texts work both against the grain of formal history-writing and to make the reader more morally aware.188 Graham Huggan understands Oskar’s ‘alternately self-justifying and self-incriminating escapism’ as part of an allegorical narrative which ‘registers both an outcry against the times involving the attempt to escape from or militate against history and a statement of the times in which history is viewed as a process of

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decay’.189 Allegory is always dependent upon the reader’s recognition of it for its function, and so this is another way of asserting the reader’s necessarily active role in the ethical operation of Grass’s texts. In his novel, Die Rättin, Grass develops a temporal dimension which he terms ‘Vergegenkunft’ or ‘pastpresenture’, in which, as Theodore Ziolkowski describes, he ‘seeks to show how the past and future are always implicit in the present, and the imaginative in the real’.190 This is also the intended effect of the intersecting narrative dimensions in Die Blechtrommel. As Hall observes, ‘The interaction between the present and the past plays a key thematic and structural role from the very beginning of Die Blechtrommel’.191 Narrative perspective and organisation are the primary criteria for determining the significance of events within a narrative and narrative theorists Stevan Cohan and Linda Shires describe how ‘The events of a story count as significant points in time ... only insofar as they are recounted by narrative’.192 Clearly, to a certain extent, all acts of remembrance have this effect of connecting the past with the present. This actualizing aspect of remembrance is particularly significant in relation to the anamnestic model which I am claiming is involved in Grass’s response to the Holocaust, however. As discussed in Chapter One, Walter Benjamin’s answer to Max Horkheimer’s irrefutable assertions in 1937 that ‘The past injustice has happened and is over. The slain are really slain’, was to insist upon precisely this redemptive capacity of remembrance to make past events count again in the present. Grass and Kertész explore in their novels the same kind of ideas as those exchanged between Horkheimer and Benjamin, but in the specific context of the Holocaust. Some Christian theology understands what happens during the Eucharistic sacrament in terms of an idea known as ‘real presence’, according to which the experience of Christ’s passion is literally made real again for communicants. Grass’s views about writing echo this theological idea. In an interview for the Paris Review, he describes how, ‘I discovered that the verb tenses taught in grammar school – past, present and future – are not so simple in real life … Mentally, we are not restricted to chronology – we are aware of many different times at once, as if they were one.’193 Grass’s sense of the simultaneous availability of the experience of different grammatical tenses contradicts Michael Minden’s interpretation of the juxtaposition in Die Blechtrommel of the ‘subjective irretrievable pastness’ of Oskar’s childhood memories with the ‘objective irretrievable pastness’ of historical circumstances.194 Grass’s own sense of writing does not admit ‘irretrievable pastness’ since its raison d’être

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is to make the past continually present again ‘so that it becomes memory and the past is not allowed to end’.195 Conclusion The idea of anamnesis as a performative way of remembering for the sake of remembrance, which makes the remembered experiences present again in a communal context, existed prior to the coining of the Greek word. It exists in the Biblical conception of remembering expressed by the Hebrew verb root zkr, frequently applied to the Israelite obligation to remember the divine covenant, which in the attendant theological concept of actualization anticipates the Christian understanding of sacrament developed from the anamnestic injunction at the institution of the Eucharist. The anamnestic model is reinterpreted in the way in which the Holocaust is remembered in Grass’s and Kertész’s novelistic prose writing. Kertész and Grass’s texts relate to – often in the sense that they are posited against – the different religious perspectives of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. They are written in fulfilment of the distinct and yet similar commands to remember: ‘Remember the days of old’ in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament’s ‘Do this in remembrance of me’. The anamnestic injunction of the New Testament is particularly relevant as a command to remember the dead. As in Celan’s poem ‘Tenebrae’, the Eucharistic command acquires new meaning after the Holocaust, and the murdered Jews may be substituted for or included alongside Christ as the proper object of remembrance. For the Christian anamnestic command to hold any meaning after the Holocaust it must be transformed by the awareness of what happened, and include remembrance of the Jewish suffering perpetrated in the name of Christian remembrance. Although the original meaning of Eucharistic anamnesis is largely abandoned in the texts by Kertész and Grass, it continues to be a significant means of memorial orientation. Faithlessness defines itself against faith, just as Kertész’s concept of fatelessness would be unintelligible without the prior idea of fate and its association with divine intervention. Part of Kertész’s and Grass’s texts’ response to the Holocaust is their engagement with the question of the role of religious faith in the fulfilment of the duty of remembrance towards those who suffered and died. It follows that the Judaeo-Christian origins of anamnesis are part of their concern. The Christian sacramental understanding of anamnesis is reconfigured within Grass’s and Kertész’s conception of the duty of remembrance

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after the Holocaust and their enactment of this requirement in their prose fiction. Doubt about remembrance is central to Grass’s and Kertész’s work. Salman Rushdie describes the fundamental role of doubt in Grass’s thinking.196 Anamnestic doubt arises in relation to the possibility of adequately remembering the Holocaust, the reliability of the remembering subject who is usually also the narrator of their fiction and the available forms of remembrance, including theological remembrance. Grass and Kertész also doubt the capacity for change after the Holocaust to which their writing seeks to contribute. As Grass recounts in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in line with Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, post-Holocaust literature has to be predicated on this doubt about itself to avoid relapsing into earlier forms – including religious forms of remembrance – which were fatally complicit with Auschwitz. The consideration of the remembrance of the Holocaust in their prose writing in terms of Eucharistic anamnesis does not mean that Grass and Kertész understand the Holocaust in theological terms. Kertész makes his objections to the theological justification of Auschwitz clear in Ich – ein anderer.197 Kertész has described elsewhere how he views the only ‘purpose’ of life to be death, which renders life ultimately meaningless.198 For him, God is a metaphor which helps people to find a way of living in the world.199 Even Grass’s declared ‘Godlessness’ fulfils this self-orientating function.200 The Christian anamnestic command to ‘do this in remembrance of me’ is reconfigured in Grass’s and Kertész’s prose writing to remember the victims of the Holocaust in the context of an absent but – to varying degrees – hypothetically present God. The diverse, multi-vocal anamnestic perspectives entailed by the prosodic heteroglossia include the recognition that Christian anamnesis must henceforth also remember Jewish suffering. This mirrors the ethical turn proposed by Johann Baptist Metz in which self-regard becomes a regard for others’ welfare demonstrated in the question, ‘What happens to you when you suffer, when you die?’ The possibility for ethical reorientation generated by the address of novelistic prose writing responding to the Holocaust offers a basis for social and cultural change through which it might be possible to establish conditions which would permit the fulfilment of Adorno’s newly formulated categorical imperative that the Holocaust must never happen again. Responsible political and legal organisations are necessary to the undertaking of preventing another Holocaust, and Levinas make it clear that intersubjective ethical relations form the only possible basis for the existence of such

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organizations. The obligation to remember the Holocaust is also an obligation to attend to the ethical and political consequences of what happened, and to the ongoing memorial obligation itself which participates in our ethical and political lives. Grass’s and Kertész’s writing shows how this obligation extends to an examination of the simultaneous redundancy and residual ethical value of the address of Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance. After the Holocaust there can be no prospect of religious redemption, but the communal address of novelistic prose written in response to the Holocaust presents one possibility for at least sustaining the knowledge of a little of what has been lost. NOTES 1. T.W. Adorno, Notes to Literature (Volume Two), trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p.292. 2. I. Kertész, ‘Who Owns Auschwitz?’, trans. J. MacKay, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14, no.1 (2001), pp.267–72, see p.270. 3. G. Hill, The Triumph of Love (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p.82. 4. G. Grass, ‘“To Be Continued…” / “Fortsetzung Folgt…”’, PMLA, 115, no.3 (2000), pp.292–309, see p.306. Grass also uses this phrase in the 1967 entry for Mein Jahrhundert (My Century, 1999) which describes Paul Celan’s visit to Martin Heidegger (Göttingen: Steidl, 1999), see p.176. 5. See Adorno, Notes to Literature (Volume Two), p.292. 6. Ibid., p.294. 7. I. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), p.23. 8. Ibid., p.14. 9. Plato, Meno, trans. W.R.M. Lamb (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), p.85D. 10. Ibid., p.86A–B. 11. Plato, Theaetetus, trans. H.N. Fowler (London: Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, 1928), p.191D. 12. D. Scott, ‘Platonic Anamnesis Revisited’, Classical Quarterly, 37, no.2 (1987), pp.346–66, see p.346. 13. H.L. Arnold, ‘Ausgehend vom Labesweg 13: Rückblick auf Günter Grass’, Neue Rundschau, 114, no.4 (2003), pp.112–33, see p.115. 14. See pp.13–25 of Katharina Hall’s Günter Grass’s ‘Danzig Quintet’ (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2007) for a helpful overview of the circumstances of Grass’s confession and the various reactions to it. Anne Fuchs provides a detailed account of reactions in the German media in her article, ‘“Ehrlich, du lügst wie gedruckt”: Günter Grass’s Autobiographical Confession and the Changing Territory of Germany’s Memory Culture’, German Life and Letters, LX, no.2 (2007), pp.261–75, see pp.263–7. 15. See Grass, Mein Jahrhundert, p.276. 16. I. Kertész, Kaddish for a Child Not Born, trans. C.C. Wilson and K.M. Wilson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), p.15.

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17. I was a member of the audience for Imre Kertész’s conversation with Evi Blaikie at the Royal National Hotel in Bloomsbury, London, on 5 March 2006. This event was part of the programme for Jewish Book Week 2006. 18. I. Kertész, Galeerentagebuch, trans. K. Schwamm (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1999), p.295. 19. Ibid., p.213. 20. I. Kertész, Die englische Flagge: Erzählungen, trans. G. Buda and K. Schwamm (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2002), p.57. 21. I. Kertész, Ich – ein anderer, trans. I. Rakusa (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1998), p.73. 22. Ibid., p.103; see Kertész, Galeerentagebuch, pp.93, 302. 23. See Kertész, Galeerentagebuch, p.263. 24. See Kertész, Ich – ein anderer, pp.48, 55. 25. Ibid., p.100. 26. T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), p.399. 27. H. Jonas, ‘The Concept of God After Auschwitz’, in L. Vogel (ed.), Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good After Auschwitz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), pp.131–43, see p.133. 28. Ibid., pp.138–42. 29. A. Bowie, Introduction to German Philosophy (Oxford: Polity, 2003), p.240. 30. E. Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. S. Hand (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p.291. 31. C.F. Alford, Levinas, the Frankfurt School and Psychoanalysis (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), p.87. 32. E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: an Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp.212–14; and E. Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), pp.156–62. 33. E. Levinas, On Thinking-of-the-Other: entre nous, trans. M.B. Smith and B. Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp.201–6. 34. Ibid., p.xi. 35. S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.25. 36. See Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p.53. 37. See Critchley and Bernasconi (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, p.14. 38. Cited in M. Eskin, Ethics and Dialogue: In the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandelśhtam, and Celan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.38. 39. E. Levinas, ‘God and Philosophy’, trans. R.A. Cohen and A. Lingis, in S. Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp.166–89, see p.173. 40. Ibid., p.183. 41. D.G. Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre, 1945), p.xi. 42. Ibid., p.55. 43. D. Gregg, Anamnesis in the Eucharist (Bramcote, Notts: Grove Books, 1976), pp.3–5. 44. See H.R. Anderson, Prayer Book Teaching on the Atonement and the Sacrament of Remembrance (London: John Roberts Press, 1923). 45. G.D. Kilpatrick, The Eucharist in Bible and Liturgy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p.57.

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46. H.N. Bate, ‘Eucharistic Worship – The Primitive Type’, in H.N. Bate and F.C. Eeles, Thoughts on the Shape of the Liturgy (London: Alcuin Club, 1946), pp.7–19, see p.15. 47. H.N. Bate, ‘On Consecration Prayers’, in H.N. Bate and F.C. Eeles, Thoughts on the Shape of the Liturgy (London: Alcuin Club, 1946), pp.20–32, see pp.28– 31. 48. See Gregg, Anamnesis in the Eucharist, p.4. 49. See Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, p.1. 50. Ibid., p.58. 51. N. Clarke, An Approach to the Theology of the Sacraments (London: SCM, 1956), p.64. 52. A. Urio, The Concept of Memory in the Chagga Life Cycle in Relation to Christian Eucharistic Traditions (Erlangen: Evangelical Lutheran Mission Publishing House, 1990), p.158. 53. M.H. Sykes, ‘The Eucharist as “Anamnesis”’, The Expository Times, 71, no.4 (January 1960), pp.115–18, see p.117. 54. See Gregg, Anamnesis in the Eucharist, p.24. 55. See Clarke, An Approach to the Theology of the Sacraments, p.62. 56. See Gregg, Anamnesis in the Eucharist, p.27. 57. See Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, p.245. 58. See Urio, The Concept of Memory, p.10. 59. R.J. Ginn, The Present and the Past: A Study of Anamnesis (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1989), p.25. 60. Ibid., p.69. 61. B.T. Morrill, Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2000), p.140. 62. Ibid., pp.29–31. 63. Ibid., p.29. 64. Ibid., p.46. 65. T. Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, trans. A. Denner and A. Pollack (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996), p.287. 66. G. Grass, Schreiben nach Auschwitz (Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand, 1990). 67. See Kertész, Galeerentagebuch, pp.32–3. 68. Ibid., p.280. 69. Ibid., p.132. 70. G. Grass, ‘According to Rough Estimates…’, in M. Kämpchen (ed.), My Broken Love: Günter Grass in India and Bangladesh (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2001), pp.49–61, see p.58. 71. See Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p.366. 72. See Grass, ‘According to Rough Estimates…’, p.51. 73. Ibid., p.58. 74. See Kertész, Ich – ein anderer, p.90. 75. John Reddick suggested that Grass’s first three novels be regarded as the ‘Danzig Trilogy’ in 1975. In an essay in 2007 I proposed that Grass’s 2002 novella, Im Krebsgang, also belongs to this sequence so that it in fact ought to be regarded as the ‘Danzig Tetralogy’, see S. Burnside, ‘“Niemand sprach von dem Knochenberg”: Die Darstellung des Konzentrationslagers Stutthof in Günter Grass’ Roman Hundejahre’, in W. Lenarczyk, A. Mix, J. Schwartz and V.

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76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

Forgetting to Remember Springmann (eds), KZ Verbrechen. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Konzentrationslager und ihrer Erinnerung (Berlin: Metropol-Verlag, 2007), pp.191–204. In doing so, I overlooked Grass’s novel örtlich betäubt (1969). Katharina Hall’s conception of a sequence of five texts forming the ‘Danzig Quintet’ is therefore currently the most appropriate, see K. Hall, Günter Grass’s ‘Danzig Quintet’ (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), p.23. See Hall, Günter Grass’s ‘Danzig Quintet’, p.15, n.6. I. Kertész, ‘Who Owns Auschwitz?’, trans. J. MacKay, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14, no.1 (2001), pp.267–72, see p.267. Ibid., pp.268–9. Ibid., p.268. Plato, Phaedo, trans. D. Gallop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p.96B. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX and London: University of Texas Press, 1981), p.259. Ibid., p.260. See Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p.263. Ibid., p.279. Ibid., p.272. Ibid., p.287. See Kertész, Kaddish, p.15 (my emphasis). See Rosenfeld, A Double Dying, p.138; Hall, Günter Grass’s ‘Danzig Quintet’, pp.113–14; see also Peter Arnds’s discussion of heteroglossia in relation to Die Blechtrommel in Representation, Subversion, and Eugenics in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), pp.28–48. I. Kertész, Fiasko, trans. G. Buda and A. Relle (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1999), pp.70, 75, 101. Ibid., pp.82, 104. Kertész, Die englische Flagge, p.179. See Kertész, Ich – ein anderer, p.25. I. Kertész, ‘Heureka!’, trans. I. Sanders, PMLA, 118, no.3 (2003), pp.604–14, see p.604. G. Grass, ‘Über meinen Lehrer Döblin’, in Aufsätze zur Literatur (Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1980), pp.67–91, see p.70. See Kertész, ‘Heureka!’, p.605. Ibid., p.605. See Hill, ‘Under Judgement’, p.212. See Kertész, Galeerentagebuch, pp.190, 197; Kertész, ‘Heureka!’, p.605. See Kertész, Galeerentagebuch, p.214. See Kertész, ‘Heureka!’, p.606. See Grass, ‘Über meinen Lehrer Döblin’, p.72. J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), p.6. Ibid., p.8. Ibid., p.8. Ibid., p.13. See Kertész, Galeerentagebuch, p.27. I. Kertész, Eine Gedankenlänge Stille, während das Erschießungskommando neu lädt (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2002), p.9. See Kertész, ‘Heureka!’, p.607. See Kertész, Ich – ein anderer, p.101.

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110. I. Kertész, Liquidation, trans. L. Kornitzer and I. Krüger (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2005), p.68. 111. Ibid., p.76. 112. See Kertész, ‘Who Owns Auschwitz?’, p.268. 113. See Kertész, Ich – ein anderer, pp.97–8. 114. See Kertész, Die englische Flagge, pp.28–9. 115. See Kertész, Liquidation, p.132. 116. See Hall, Günter Grass’s ‘Danzig Quintet’, p.21. 117. G. Grass, ‘Calcutta’s Problems are the Problems of the World’, interview with Sadanand Menon, in M. Kämpchen (ed.), My Broken Love: Günter Grass in India and Bangladesh (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2001), pp.167–71, see p.168. 118. See Grass, Mein Jahrhundert, p.193. 119. See Kertész, Die englische Flagge, p.9. 120. See Kertész, Liquidation, p.75. 121. See Kertész, Ich – ein anderer, pp.92–3. 122. Ibid., p.96. 123. S. Rushdie, ‘Introduction’, in Günter Grass, On Writing and Politics 1967–1983 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985), pp.ix–xv, see p.xiv. 124. See Kertész, Liquidation, p.105. 125. See Kertész, Ich – ein anderer, p.97. 126. G. Steiner, Real Presences (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), p.134. 127. See, for example, Kertész’s horror upon being asked to sit through the short session of afternoon prayer at Cologne Cathedral in Ich – ein anderer (p.51), and Grass’s declaration in relation to the conversion to Roman Catholicism of his literary role-model, Alfred Döblin, ‘ihm ... hatte der Glaube geschlagen; ich kann ihm nicht mehr folgen’ (‘Über meinen Lehrer Döblin’, p.69). 128. See Kertész, Galeerentagebuch, p.76. 129. See Kertész, Ich – ein anderer, pp.86, 91. 130. See Kertész, ‘Who Owns Auschwitz?’, p.268. 131. See Kertész, Ich – ein anderer, p.83. 132. Ibid., p.102. 133. See, for example, S.D. Cohen, ‘Imre Kertész, Jewishness in Hungary, and the Choice of Identity’, in L.O. Vasvári and S. Tötösy de Zepetnek (eds), Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005), pp.24–37, see p.30; S. Herring, ‘“Her Brothers Dead in Riverside or Russia”: “Kaddish” and the Holocaust’, Contemporary Literature, 42, no.3 (Fall 2001), pp.535–56, see p.536; A. Kertzer, ‘Reading Imre Kertész in English’, in L.O. Vasvári and S. Tötösy de Zepetnek (eds), Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005), pp.111–24, see p.120; J. Skolnik, ‘Kaddish for Spinoza: Memory and Modernity in Celan and Heine’, New German Critique, 77 (Spring-Summer 1999), pp.169–86, see p.169. More subtle accounts of the literary uses of the Kaddish are offered by J.B. Lazarus, ‘The Art of Elie Wiesel in “The Gates of the Forest’’’, Modern Language Studies, 24, no.4 (Fall 1994), pp.39-46, see p.44 and S.P. Sibelman, ‘The Dialogue of Peniel: Elie Wiesel’s Les Portes de la forêt and Genesis 32: 23–33’, The French Review, 61, no.5 (April 1988), pp.747–57, see p.755. 134. See Ruth M. Green’s pamphlet A Guide to Mourners (London: Reform Synagogues of Great Britain, 1978) for an account of the various occasions when the Kaddish is recited by mourners.

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135. I. Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History, trans. R.P. Scheindlin (Philadelphia, PA and Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1993), pp.80–1. 136. A.Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Liturgy and Its Development (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1932), p.86. 137. Ibid., p.85. 138. E.W.G. Masterman, ‘Jewish Customs of Birth, Marriage, and Death’, The Biblical World, 22, no.4 (1903), pp.248–57, see p.254. 139. See Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy, p.81. 140. S.C. Reif, Judaism and Hebrew Prayer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p.220. 141. See Idelsohn, Jewish Liturgy, p.86. 142. For detailed considerations of the post-Holocaust relationship of God and history see, for example, E. Berkovits, ‘Faith After the Holocaust’, in E.N. Dorff and L.E. Newman (eds), Contemporary Jewish Theology: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.355–73; I. Greenberg, ‘Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust’, in E.N. Dorff and L.E. Newman (eds), Contemporary Jewish Theology: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.396–416. 143. See Kertész, Kaddish, p.33. 144. Ibid., pp.33–4, 36, 56, 94. 145. Ibid., p.16. 146. Ibid., p.17. 147. Ibid., pp.19, 69, 88. 148. Ibid., p.69. 149. See Kertész, Fateless, p.119. 150. S.D. Cohen, ‘Imre Kertész, Jewishness in Hungary, and the Choice of Identity’, in L. O. Vasvári and S. Tötösy de Zepetnek (eds), Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005), pp.24–37, see pp.29–30. 151. A. Kertzer, ‘Reading Imre Kertész in English’, in L.O. Vasvári and S. Tötösy de Zepetnek (eds), Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005), pp.111–24, see p.120. 152. R. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p.235. 153. In Real Presences, George Steiner describes how God haunts the standard view of the modern ‘post-theological’ condition as ‘a phantom of grammar’. Steiner, on the other hand, argues for the ‘necessary possibility’ of God, also within grammatical terms: ‘The conjecture is that “God” is, not because our grammar is outworn; but that grammar lives and generates worlds because there is the wager on God’ (pp.3–4). 154. See Kertész, Kaddish, pp.4, 11, 12, 22, 24, 55. 155. See Kertész, Ich – ein anderer, p.111. 156. Ibid., pp.111–12. 157. J.B. Metz, ‘Ökumene nach Auschwitz – Zum Verhältnis von Christen und Juden in Deutschland’, in Eugen Kogon (ed.), Gott nach Auschwitz: Dimensionen des Massenmords am jüdischen Volk (Freiburg: Herder, 1989), pp.121–44, see p.123. 158. G. Grass, ‘Rückblick auf “Die Blechtrommel” oder Der Autor als fragwürdiger Zeuge’, in Aufsätze zur Literatur (Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1980), pp.92–8 see p.93.

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159. Ibid., p.97. 160. G. Grass, Die Blechtrommel (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002), p.175. 161. Ibid., p.175. 162. Ibid., pp.468–71. 163. Ibid., pp.764–79. 164. Ibid., p.53. 165. S.H. Abbott, ‘Günter Grass’ Hundejahre: A Realistic Novel About Myth’, German Quarterly, 55, no.2 (March 1982), pp.212–20, see p.218. 166. See Grass, ‘“To Be Continued…”’, p.307. 167. See Grass, Die Blechtrommel, p.208. 168. Ibid., pp.175–6. 169. See for example, Arnds, Representation, Subversion, and Eugenics, pp.11, 102; N. Thomas, The Narrative Works of Günter Grass: A Critical Interpretation (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 1982), pp.15–16, 31. 170. G. Grass, Katz und Maus (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996), p.18. 171. Ibid., pp.17–19. 172. Ibid., pp.29, 53–5, 89–90, 106–8, 110, 149–50. 173. Ibid., pp.95, 102, 104, 109. 174. Ibid., p.54. 175. Ibid., pp.45, 140. 176. Ibid., p.42. 177. See Grass, Die Blechtrommel, p.258. 178. Ibid., p.261. 179. See Kertész, ‘Heureka!’, p.608. 180. See Grass, Die Blechtrommel, p.11. 181. See Grass, ‘“To Be Continued…”’, p.306. 182. See Grass, Die Blechtrommel, pp.523–7, 543–50. 183. Ibid., pp.455, 474–5. 184. See Arnold, ‘Rückblick auf Günter Grass’, p.120. 185. T. Ziolkowski, ‘Günter Grass’s Century’, World Literature Today, 74, no.1 (Winter 2000), pp.19–26, see p.20. 186. M. Minden, ‘A Post-Realist Aesthetic: Günter Grass, Die Blechtrommel’, in David Midgley (ed.), The German Novel in the Twentieth Century: Beyond Realism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), pp.149–63, see p.151. 187. W.G. Cunliffe, ‘Aspects of the Absurd in Günter Grass’, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 7, no.3 (1966), pp.311–27, see p.314. 188. H. Brode, Die Zeitgeschichte im erzählenden Werk von Günter Grass (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1977), p.85. 189. G. Huggan, ‘Is The (Günter) Grass Greener On The Other Side? Oskar And Lucinde In The New World’, World Literature Written in English, 30, no.1 (Spring 1990), pp.1–10, see pp.1, 2. 190. See Ziolkowski, ‘Günter Grass’s Century’, p.20. 191. See Hall, Günter Grass’s ‘Danzig Quintet’, p.20. 192. S. Cohan and L. Shires, Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), p.84. 193. G. Grass, ‘The Art of Fiction’, Paris Review, 119 (Summer 1991), pp.209–40, see p.125. 194. See Minden, ‘A Post-Realist Aesthetic’, p.149.

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195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200.

See Grass, ‘“To Be Continued…”’, p.306. See Rushdie, ‘Introduction’, in On Writing and Politics 1967–1983, p.xiii. See Kertész, Ich – ein anderer, p.55. See Kertész, Galeerentagebuch, p.243. Ibid., p.302. See Grass, ‘“To Be Continued…”’.

4

Drama as Testament: Peter Weiss and Samuel Beckett ‘All the dead voices.’ (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)

I

n 1976, Milton Teichman wrote that:

The best literature dealing with the Holocaust assumes the worthwhileness of human experience and the dignity and preciousness of human life, and offers a perspective on life different from that found in much of modern literature which sees life as meaningless and absurd. Students need to know that writers like Beckett, Burroughs and Butor do not have the last word on the human condition.1 Teichman was reflecting upon his experiences of teaching a course on Holocaust literature at ‘a small liberal arts college’ in New York. Texts discussed on Teichman’s course included, among other canonical works, the English translation of Peter Weiss’s Die Ermittlung, The Investigation. Why did Teichman’s approach to teaching Holocaust literature, common to many subsequent educators within what is now the distinct discipline of Holocaust studies, include Peter Weiss but exclude Samuel Beckett? Weiss’s documentary representation of the 1964–65 Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt is certainly more obviously ‘about’ the Holocaust than any of Beckett’s plays, and consequently emerges as a favoured object of classroom teaching and literary criticism when the subject is the Holocaust. Teichman’s objection to Beckett’s literary response to the Holocaust is not founded on this criterion of accessibility, however, but is rather a moral objection to

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Beckett’s portrayal of the human condition. For Teichman, the literary insistence of Beckett and others that life is ‘meaningless and absurd’ is a betrayal of the remembrance owed to the victims of the Holocaust. Although Weiss’s response to the Holocaust in Die Ermittlung clearly constitutes a very different dramatic event with very different emphases to those in works by Beckett like Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Teichman’s implied conclusion about their utterly opposed views of humanity is misguided. Alvin H. Rosenfeld presents a very different evaluation of Beckett and Weiss in his commanding study of Holocaust literature, A Double Dying. In fact, as with Teichman’s course, Beckett’s works are not considered in Rosenfeld’s survey, whereas Weiss’s play Die Ermittlung is extensively analysed. For Rosenfeld, however, Beckett’s oeuvre is a much more appropriate response to the Holocaust than Weiss’s play, which he argues is hopelessly distorted by Weiss’s Marxist agenda of portraying it as an inevitable outcome of capitalist society.2 Rosenfeld refers to Beckett only once, in the introduction to his book, when he presents a quotation from the ‘Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit’ as an exemplary statement on the possibility of formulating a literary response to the Holocaust: Samuel Beckett, himself not a direct survivor of the death camps but someone whose imagination has absorbed more than a little of their impact, has formulated this issue as well as anyone has, and his words can be taken as implicitly part of the vocation of all Holocaust authors: ‘There is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express … together with the obligation to express’.3 This quotation derives from Beckett’s discussion of the work of the French painter Pierre Tal-Coat, and describes what he thinks all art ought to aim for. Rosenfeld identifies the way in which for Beckett thinking about the Holocaust leads to linguistic rupture not only in terms of what can be said, but in the very possibility of saying. Even though Rosenfeld does not elaborate on the specific ways in which Beckett’s texts fulfil what he interprets as that author’s characterization of the problematics of the literary remembrance of the Holocaust, the judgement about Beckett’s texts which his book implies nonetheless seems to me to be more apt than that of Teichman. Still, Rosenfeld’s account of Weiss’s play, in its justified accusation that Weiss’s play offers a reductive ‘explanation’ of the Holocaust, does not take

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account of other dimensions to Weiss’s thinking, notably his own reflections on the conceptual challenges to linguistic expression after the Holocaust, and his struggle to reconcile the suffering of innocent victims in Auschwitz with the theological categories in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which supplement and complicate his ideological perspective and which I consider in more detail below. In spite of the manifold differences in the ways in which Peter Weiss and Samuel Beckett respond to the Holocaust in their writings, I will argue that their play-texts have a common formal dimension in the manner of their articulation of remembrance of the Holocaust. Just as, in the preceding chapters, I have shown the connection between the structure of address in particular literary forms responding to the Holocaust and the forms of remembrance in particular JudaeoChristian modes of worship, between poetry and confession and novelistic prose and anamnesis, I want here to demonstrate a connection between the way remembrance occurs in some dramatic texts written in response to the Holocaust and the articulation of remembrance in the Biblical form of the testament. Rather than cataloguing the differences between Weiss’s and Beckett’s manifestly dissimilar dramatic styles, then, this chapter emphasizes a congruity in the way remembrance of the Holocaust is enacted through their texts. The testamentary quality of the remembrance in these plays derives from the nature of the performative address which takes place in the text. In the previous chapters, the designation of poetry as ‘confessional’ referred to the particular structure of memorial address established between the poetic voice and the individual addressee which is like the relationship between speaker and confessor in sacramental confession, and the identification of novelistic prose as ‘anamnestic’ meant the participation of the multiple speakers and addressees in a communal, actualizing context of remembrance analogous to that in the celebration of the Eucharist. Here, ‘testamentary’ drama alludes to another aspect of Judaeo-Christian ritual remembrance. In this case the formal model is the Biblical testament, in which a speaker stands before an audience and proclaims what he knows, or bears witness. As with the religious forms of remembrance which inform the way the Holocaust is remembered in the texts I have considered from other literary genres, the testamentary communicative model involves a particular kind of ethical orientation towards others derived from its mode of address. The Old and New Testaments are the collective expression of the witness of Judaeo-Christian belief, formed of innumerable instances

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of this testamentary form of remembrance. Within Judaeo-Christian understanding, the Bible is a repository of God’s revelation to believers. The Christian writer Charles Gore explains the origin of the word ‘testament’ in relation to the Biblical writings. In the Greek version of the Bible, the books were known as the Old and New Covenants, where the Greek diatheké translated the Hebrew word brit. In subsequent Latin translations, however, diatheké was translated as testamentum, which is the rendering which has prevailed. Gore comments that ‘surely it would have been a great gain if we had spoken of “the Old” and “the New Covenants” rather than “the Old and New Testaments”; for the latter word suggests a legacy from one who is gone, and the former an established and permanent relationship with one who is alive’.4 In fact, references to ‘testaments’ in the religious context do entail Gore’s preferred covenantal meaning, as the OED documents, with its implications for an ethical conduct founded on mutually fulfilling relationships with other living people. Commenting on the origins of the collection of canonical writings which make up the Old Testament, Gore asserts that ‘The “word of the Lord” is a living voice – a message still being spoken – which had been in part already codified and recorded in writing, but which did not get its authority from a book’.5 This understanding of the nature of the religious testament informs my understanding of the testamentary remembrance of the Holocaust in Beckett’s and Weiss’s plays. The dramatic remembrance could also be described as ‘a living voice – a message still being spoken’, which perseveres in the agonizing awareness of what Beckett refers to as ‘All the dead voices’.6 The live performance of the play-text is the ultimate fulfilment of the ‘living’ aspect of the testamentary meaning. The religious testament is not limited to the expression of a single speaker, since ‘God was to speak through the whole succession of the prophets – “in many parts and in many manners”’.7 This multi-vocal aspect of the testamentary form corresponds to the multiple speakers customarily entailed by the dramatic literary genre. In what follows I will show how Beckett’s En attendant Godot (1952), translated into English as Waiting for Godot (1954), and Weiss’s Die Ermittlung (1965) (The Investigation) fulfil the authors’ conception of the ongoing duty to remember the Holocaust through the testamentary act. In so doing they embody the anticipated capacity of Holocaust literature in general to endure beyond other types of contemporary literature, which Rosenfeld describes with recourse to the term ‘testament’: ‘It will stand to the ages … as a testament of our times’.8

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My comparison of the literary remembrance of the Holocaust in drama to Biblical testamentary remembrance is informed by the genre of Holocaust survivor testimony, which is also frequently considered in terms of Biblical testamentary precedents. Primo Levi characterizes the testimonies of all survivors of the Holocaust as ‘stories of a new Bible’.9 The psychiatrist Dori Laub, a co-founder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale,10 identifies a defensive tendency among those who listen to survivors’ testimonies to ‘endow the survivor with a kind of sanctity, both to pay our tribute to him and to keep him at a distance, to avoid the intimacy entailed in knowing’.11 David G. Roskies was one of the earliest commentators to note the tendency among literary critics (including Rosenfeld) to regard Holocaust literature as religious literature, and particularly to view survivor testimony as Biblical scripture.12 Roskies, by contrast, interprets Holocaust literature – and especially testimonial literature written during the Holocaust – within a continuum of Jewish literary responses to experiences of catastrophe, and a corresponding tradition of subverting Biblical motifs in order to articulate a sense of atrocity.13 In Byron L. Sherwin’s characterization of Elie Wiesel’s writings as a new Bible, he describes how such a Bible ‘would have as its major theme not God’s disappointment with man but man’s disappointment with God’.14 Lawrence L. Langer describes how in Holocaust survivors’ oral testimonies ‘The atmosphere of eschatology hovers over these testimonies through its very absence’.15 In his book about the interactions between individual and collective forms of Holocaust remembrance, The Longest Shadow, the literary scholar Geoffrey H. Hartman describes how he came to be involved in establishing the survivor testimony project at Yale.16 Hartman is acutely conscious of the diverse ways in which Biblical literary models influence and interconnect with Holocaust survivor testimonies, observing that ‘traditional paradigms, drawn from the treasury of Bible, Midrash, and martyrology continue to exert a strong influence’, although the detail of the testimonies often eludes such paradigms.17 Hartman notes the frequent resort to theological categories in efforts to think about the Holocaust.18 He describes the Bible as a source of continuity between Jewish life before and after the Holocaust, and relates how the long oral traditions of Hebrew scholarship also influence the oral transmission of Holocaust testimony.19 Hartman repeatedly suggests that the experience of bearing witness to the Holocaust is partly modelled upon Biblical examples of desolation and ways of attesting to that loss, even though these are invariably

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inadequate.20 He discusses Yosef Yerushalmi’s account of the differing implications of the memorial imperative for art and history which I considered in Chapter One and, like Langer,21 Hartman proposes Holocaust survivor testimony as a memorial genre which might be capable of ‘modifying the breach’ between memorial discourses identified by Yerushalmi.22 The inadequacy of the Biblical testament as a model of remembrance for the testimony of Holocaust survivors is part of the point Weiss’s and Beckett’s play-texts make in their dramatization of the testamentary act. In so doing they make use of their own literary status to reinterpret different kinds of memorial discourse. Hartman is more open to the interconnectedness of memorial forms than Yerushalmi, and refers to those features of survivor testimony which lend themselves to literary analysis,23 but he is mindful of the distinction between testimony and other literary forms which might be influenced by or related to this genre: We should not underestimate the counterforce of literature as it combines with testimony. I don’t mean forms of fiction like docudrama or historical novel. These are, and always have been, problematic if influential constructs. There has emerged, however, a body of works ‘between history and literature’, including witness accounts and remarkable essays that seem to defy the Freudian formula that where trauma is, consciousness is not.24 Hartman’s designation of the ‘problematic if influential’ ‘docudrama’ would include Weiss’s Die Ermittlung, which is based on witness testimony from the Auschwitz trial. I consider below some of the ways in which Die Ermittlung has been interpreted as problematic in relation to its organization and manipulation of the documentary material. The play-texts by Weiss and Beckett that I examine are not literally survivor testimonies, the genre which is of pre-eminent concern to Hartman, but they have their own role to play in their testimonial dramatization of the interaction between different forms of remembrance, and between history and literature. Paul Davies contends that what Hartman elsewhere describes as his aspiration for literature – the restoration of the separation between denken and dichten (thinking and writing poetry) – is fulfilled precisely in the work of Beckett.25 Hartman stresses that he does not intend to privilege historical memory over other forms of cultural memory, since that would be just another simplification of the subtly interconnected discourses of

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remembrance and their competing memorial claims. He elaborates by explaining that ‘The issue of how memory and history become art is always a complicated one; in the case of the Shoah the question is also whether they should become art.’26 Artistic treatments of survivor testimony differ in whether or not and the degree to which they characterize testimony as a religious form of remembrance, but it is remarkable how often they adopt some sort of position in this context, even if it is to reject any religious association. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub describe how in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, for example, ‘Its whole effort is, precisely, to decanonize the silence, to desacralize the witness’.27 Langer begins his study of survivor testimonies by expressing his scepticism regarding the habitual resort to religious vocabulary to try and conceptualize the ‘impossible circumstances’ of Holocaust experience.28 While those commenting on the Holocaust, including literary critics, may need to be alert to the temptation to lapse into what Langer terms ‘bracing pieties’, there is an ongoing need to address both the consequences of the widely perceived linguistic-theological connection in responses to the Holocaust, and the less widely accounted for circumstances of this connection. My consideration of dramatic remembrance of the Holocaust as testament relates to two theological testamentary models, and is informed by Emmanuel Levinas’s conception of the act of ‘saying’ as the basis of ethical intersubjectivity. The first theological model is the idea of remembrance as Vergegenwärtigung or actualization, which I introduced in Chapter One and considered in relation to the discussion of prose writing as anamnesis in Chapter Three. In the account of the operation of Vergegenwärtigung by the Christian theologian Hans Zirker, already quoted in Chapter One: ‘the celebration of the liturgy is seen as an event in which the community of worshippers become eyewitnesses to their own history, which then unfolds all over again in the words’.29 This description might also be employed to explain how remembrance of the Holocaust is enacted in Weiss’s Die Ermittlung where the theatre-going audience becomes the eyewitnesses of history by virtue of what is remembered in the testimonies – the ‘living voices’ – of the actors on stage. The actualizing testamentary model applies less straightforwardly to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, since his text does not describe the events of the Holocaust, but rather enacts the difficulties of linguistic and theological relations after it, so that the act of textual address is itself a way of bearing witness to what happened. The address of the Biblical testament, like that of Holocaust

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testimony, involves those who listen in an act of remembrance which sets up the possibility for a reorientation of intersubjective relationships. The second theological model which illuminates my comparison is the Jewish theologian Irving Greenberg’s conception of the ‘voluntary covenant’ as the necessary Jewish way of life after the Holocaust. In Greenberg’s view the definitive Jewish experience of the covenant relationship with God has progressively evolved from an involuntary to a voluntary undertaking in response to successive historical experiences of destruction and loss.30 The initial Biblical experience of the covenant, while always an expression of God’s respect for human free will, nonetheless involved elements of enforced obedience through God’s capacity to punish those who failed to uphold the covenant, and circumcision as the involuntary and indelible mark of the covenant relationship. Since their role as the covenant people condemned Jews to death in the Holocaust, their obedience to the covenant ‘can no longer be commanded’.31 While the first and second destructions of the Temple resulted in the Jewish people assuming more and more personal responsibility for fulfilling the terms of the covenant, after the Holocaust the only meaningful way for it to continue is as a voluntary commitment.32 Greenberg’s proposal provokes objections from Jewish thinkers such as Steven L. Jacobs, who claims that his conception of the postHolocaust relationship between Jews and God ought not to go by the name of ‘covenant’ at all,33 and contradicts the view of many including Jacobs, Elie Wiesel and Jacob Glatstein, that the covenant is nullified by the events of the Holocaust. Greenberg’s counter-argument is that ‘the voluntary stage is implicit in the covenantal model from the very beginning. Once God self-limits out of respect for human dignity, once human free will is accepted, the ultimate logic is a voluntary covenant.’34 In response to those who would abandon the covenant after the Holocaust, Greenberg points to the paradoxical possibility for atheism to have a role in affirming the ongoing covenantal relationship with God, maintaining that, ‘The witness is given by their actions’.35 Since those who carried out murders in the Holocaust included people who claimed to believe in God, we should judge people henceforth by their actions, not their words, and be aware that self-proclaimed atheists may behave with more care for others than those who profess religious affiliations.36 The openness of post-Holocaust theology to apparently atheist positions extends to secular literature. Greenberg outlines the role of

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ongoing literary testimony to the Holocaust as ‘new secular liturgical acts’.37 This shares the hope of Albert H. Friedlander, discussed in Chapter One, that literary acts of remembrance of the Holocaust might assume theological importance by bringing people of different and no faiths together in shared ritual practice. Alan L. Berger describes how the writings of Lev Raphael and Art Spiegelman fulfil the requirements of Greenberg’s voluntary covenant to bear witness to the Holocaust, emphasizing their identity as second-generation children of Jewish Holocaust survivors.38 Weiss and Beckett, on the other hand, do not identify themselves as Jewish, yet their work bears dramatic witness to the Holocaust in a way which is formally linked to the idea of covenant through its connection with the Biblical testamentary form of remembrance. Theirs is a secular witness which nonetheless remains connected to a theological model of witnessing. Crucially, Greenberg indicates how participation in such secular witnessing may result in more ethically responsible behaviour towards others.39 The way in which intersubjective reorientation might be accomplished in Weiss and Beckett’s texts is suggested by Levinas’s account of the manifestation and fulfilment of each individual’s infinite responsibility towards the other in the act of speaking which has already been discussed in Chapters Two and Three. In the foreword to Proper Names, Levinas summarizes the historical horrors of the twentieth century and reflects that ‘at no other time has historical experience weighed so heavily upon ideas: or, at least, never before have the members of one generation been more aware of that weight’.40 He comments that the ideas broached in the previous century regarding the death of God, human contingency and the failure of humanism have consequently assumed ‘apocalyptic proportions’.41 Levinas goes on to lament the ‘general alienation from the meaningful as posited’ generated by the ‘new anxiety, that of language cast adrift’, and the attendant ‘obsession with the inexpressible, the ineffable, the unsaid – which are sought in the awkward expression, the slip of the tongue, the scatological’.42 This list might be taken from a piece of Beckett literary criticism, but Levinas’s scepticism towards the deconstructionist preoccupation with what is said or unsaid, in formulations which are frequently identified as classical markers of Beckett’s linguistic style, does not preclude the connection between Levinas’s sense of ethical relations as saying and the testamentary operation of Beckett’s post-Holocaust drama. For Levinas, as well as for Beckett’s characters, speaking is both the banishment of indifference towards the other, and the mark of the

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other’s unknowable difference from oneself,43 and so speech is the situation within which intersubjective reorientation can occur. This is true even when, as is frequently the case for Beckett’s speakers, the content of what is said describes what might be construed as a state of indifference. In an evocation of Levinas’s sense of ‘saying in relation to’, Langer describes how the significance of the oral testimony of Holocaust survivors is predicated upon its being listened to.44 The therapeutic function performed by the person who listens to testimony of a traumatic past in relation to the witness is the basis of the psychoanalytic understanding of testimony as outlined by Laub.45 Felman and Laub consider witness testimony to be ‘the common ground between literature and ethics’.46 Hartman similarly posits Holocaust survivors’ oral testimonies in terms which evoke Levinas’s ethics: ‘After the camps, then, the survivors not only testify, that is, describe the terror undergone, but speak: they testify to speech itself as an act of which they had been deprived and that enters once again into normal human intercourse.’47 In a discussion of language and culture after the Holocaust, Hartman interprets Levinas’s ethics as a valuable philosophical counterpart to Adorno’s advocacy of the preservation of an ‘onlooker’s position’: ‘the crucial question … is how we can retain the ability, within such detachment, to feel for others, not just for ourselves against others. This is where Levinas’s critique of identity philosophy deepens that of Adorno and revives moral philosophy, or the morality in philosophy.’48 Hartman’s characterization of survivor testimonies as ‘stories that are acts of facing in their very telling’ suggests one context within which Levinas’s conception of the ultimate ethical relationship can take place within post-Holocaust culture.49 Hartman has described the more complicated position of art in relation to the dissemination of Holocaust survivor testimony: ‘The role of art remains mysterious, however, for art is testimony, as well as combining with testimony’.50 I consider Beckett and Weiss’s play-texts in the same way as Felman and Laub approach those by Camus, as the indirect expressions of – or the belated testimonies to – the radical crisis of witnessing the Holocaust has been, and to the consequent, ongoing, as yet unresolved crisis of history, a crisis which in turn is translated into a crisis of literature insofar as literature becomes a witness, and perhaps the only witness, to the crisis within history which precisely cannot be articulated, witnessed in the given categories of history itself.51

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While it can always only be a kind of ‘secondary witnessing’, it would seem that testamentary drama, where the text is literally conceived of as a performed or ‘spoken’ address, is the literary genre most closely aligned with Levinas’s ethics of saying. Felman characterizes the Yale survivor testimony project in terms of Celan’s poetics – the same terms which were significant for Levinas’s consideration of Celan, discussed in Chapter Two – as ‘the endeavor of creating (recreating) an address, specifically, for a historical experience which annihilated the very possibility of address’.52 Felman acknowledges that these projects of address take place in very different ways. One of the many ways in which Celan’s poetic address differs from the survivor testimonies recorded at Yale is in their differing conceptions of who is being addressed. Multiple identities can be assigned to Celan’s ‘addressable you’, but this poetic addressee is nonetheless conceived of in the grammatical singular, which, as I argued in Chapter Two, contributes to the establishing of a confessional relation in Celan’s poetic texts. By contrast, the Yale testimonies are customarily elicited in interviews conducted by two interviewers, in the presence of video-recording equipment which implies a potentially limitless audience.53 It is clearly possible for survivors to testify to an individual listener, but the paradigmatic mode of address for the genre of survivor oral-testimony, as this has been developed at Yale, is that of a single speaker before multiple addressees.54 Langer describes how the interviewers function ‘as surrogate for a larger audience’,55 which Felman envisages as ‘a listening community’56 and Hartman, after Halbwachs, terms ‘a provisional “affective community”’.57 In this sense there is a structural parallel with the Biblical testamentary address which is also by a single witness before an audience, and the related understanding of testamentary remembrance as actualization in which the community of participants become eyewitnesses to historical events. It is the common structure of address, as well as the unprecedented devastation which is being borne witness to, which prompts declarations that survivor testimonies are the literature of a new Bible. My consideration of Weiss’s and Beckett’s play-texts as testamentary relies on this sense of a structure of address shared with both survivor oral-testimony and Biblical testament. The multiple speakers in Die Ermittlung and Waiting for Godot address, usually individually, both the onstage other(s) and the theatre-going audience. As described above, there are various ways in which the survivor’s testimony may invoke, reject or simply ignore a relation to God which is invariably

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the revelatory context of the Biblical testament. Literary texts testifying to the Holocaust enact a similar range of theological positions. In Weiss and Beckett’s dramaturgical statements, as well as in the play-texts I consider, bearing witness to the Holocaust is unavoidably related to the linguistic and theological implications of testifying which coalesce in the testamentary act. The Second World War and the Holocaust Both Beckett (1906–89) and Weiss (1916–82) lived through the Second World War, but their experiences of the period and their perspectives on the Holocaust, as well as their subsequent reflections on the significance of these experiences in relation to their literary work, are markedly different. Jack Zipes attests to the extensive influence which Beckett’s plays have exerted on German-language writing for the theatre, including the work of Peter Weiss.58 He also seeks to trace the extent of the influence of German culture and history on Beckett’s writing, asserting that ‘Beckett was not known to have had much of an interest in Germany and German culture until the 1930s’.59 In her biography of Beckett Deirdre Bair describes how he developed an interest in the German language considerably earlier than this, studying German alongside French, Italian and Spanish during his time at Trinity College, Dublin.60 Beckett’s longest visit to Germany as a young man took place between September 1936 and April 1937. Bair comments that Beckett’s correspondence from this period contains only ‘two or three oblique references’ to the political situation in Germany. She observes that, ‘A natural thought is to wonder if Beckett feared the possibility of political interference or censorship, but in conversations many years later he said this thought had not occurred to him and that he had only vague recollections of the society around him’.61 Beckett did, in the course of his travels, meet a number of Jewish figures from the German art world who had suffered various forms of discrimination at the hands of the Nazis. Beckett was living in Paris during the first years of the Second World War, from where his Jewish friends gradually disappeared, or were imprisoned and finally murdered by the Nazis. Deirdre Bair quotes from an unpublished article by John Kobler written for the Saturday Evening Post in September 1964, in which Beckett describes how the fate of the Jews in Paris prompted him to abandon his neutral stance towards the war: ‘I was so outraged by the Nazis, particularly by their treatment of the Jews, that I could not remain inactive.’62 By

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the end of October 1940 Beckett had started to participate in activity on behalf of the French Resistance, receiving and relaying intelligence. In August 1942 cover for the resistance cell in which he was involved was blown and Beckett went into hiding, travelling to a remote village called Roussillon in the Vaucluse using false papers, where he remained for the next two and a half years. Beckett elaborates on his memories of living in hiding in Roussillon in an interview with James Knowlson conducted during the final months of his life, and goes on to make a rare observation concerning his memory of the victims of the Nazi camps: At the end of the war, it was terrible! The forces just opened up the extermination camps as they came through. They had nothing to eat, those of them who were left alive. So there was cannibalism. Alfred [Péron – a Jewish friend of Beckett’s] wouldn’t do it. Amazingly he got as far as Switzerland and then he died of malnutrition and exhaustion.63 Beckett was honoured with the Croix de Guerre in recognition of his resistance work in 1945 and subsequently also received the Médaille de la Résistance. He did not continue any form of political activity after the war and largely avoided direct comment on issues relating to it. Jack Zipes is explicit about the relevance of the Second World War and the Holocaust for Beckett’s work: It seems to me that the actual creation of Waiting for Godot and Endgame is unthinkable without taking into account Beckett’s experience of war, concentration camps, mass conformity, and cultural sado-masochism … Beckett’s seemingly incomprehensible images of bombed-out lives and devastation can only be comprehended in German reception history as closely connected to ways of life and action which emerged with the forces that gave rise to Auschwitz.64 In contrast to Weiss, Beckett scarcely discusses how his work responds to the circumstances of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Whereas Weiss’s published notebooks are rich sources both of autobiographical material and of insight into the development of his ideas about artistic production, no comparable resources exist for Beckett scholars. Beckett’s views on the connections between his life and his work and on his approach to writing must be gleaned from

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the accounts of conversations published by numerous acquaintances, from the relatively few critical articles he published, from his correspondence, and from the literary texts themselves. Peter Weiss was born in Berlin in 1916 and lived in Germany before emigrating with his parents to London in 1934 because of the danger to his father – a Jew who had converted to Christianity – under the Nazi regime. After a subsequent move with his parents to Czechoslovakia, Weiss studied art in Prague. In November 1938 he travelled through Germany on his Czech passport to join his family in Sweden and witnessed ‘Kristallnacht’. Weiss had Jewish friends who did not survive the war, including Peter Kien and Lucie Weisberger whom he befriended during his time studying in Prague in 1937.65 He made some attempts to rescue Weisberger from her fate at the hands of the Nazis, which he recalls in a parenthetical notebook entry from 1964.66 Weiss also lost family members: his father’s sister died with her husband in Theresienstadt. Weiss spent the war years in Sweden and gained Swedish citizenship in 1945, living there until his death in 1982. He first returned to Germany after the war in 1947, as a correspondent for a Swedish newspaper. The Weiss scholar Manfred Haiduk regards Weiss’s experiences during this trip to be of fundamental significance for his subsequent literary engagement with the Holocaust.67 Weiss’s book, first published in Swedish as De besegrade in 1948 and translated into German as Die Besiegten (The Defeated), describes his impressions of his early encounter with post-war Germany. The driving force behind the text is the ongoing tension between Weiss’s childhood memories of the topography of Bremen and Berlin and the ruinous contemporary reality. In this personal context, Weiss explores ideas about remembrance and is concerned particularly with the implications that certain memories may have for one’s current conduct. In the opening passage of Die Besiegten Weiss conjures a fantastic vision of ‘The free flight through the space of forgetting’ which brings him into contact with ‘the ruined city of the past’.68 Bremen, the city where Weiss spent much of his childhood, is now utterly changed, and Weiss’s reflections on the destroyed cityscape point towards the testamentary operation of the remembrance in Die Ermittlung: ‘the truth which it once held for you is now only within you (just as the truth attested to by the lives of the dead is now only preserved by the living)’.69 Weiss’s insight about the function of remembrance in this early text is elaborated and, crucially, enacted in Die Ermittlung, where access to memories of the dead comes through the testamentary act of bearing witness.

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Weiss also reflects in Die Besiegten on his own potential role as a witness. Responding to the suffering he encounters in the aftermath of the war, Weiss declares ‘I have been witness to an intimacy laid bare to the point of intolerableness’,70 where the unusual choice of the noun ‘intimacy’ evokes the unbearable physical and psychological suffering of the victims of the war. His capacity to carry out the role of witness is considered in the context of his initial obliviousness to the encroaching threat to his and his family’s lives in Nazi Germany. Like Beckett, Weiss did not immediately grasp the gravity of the political situation and the fatal consequences of Nazi policy towards the Jews. In Weiss’s case, it is only after the war that he finds himself able to empathize with the victims of the Holocaust and to imagine how, as a consequence of his Jewish parentage, he might have been one of them. Even in this early text, though, Weiss is also able to envisage himself having played a part in the perpetration of the Holocaust and imagines with extraordinary candour a position in which ‘I was on both sides. ... I was murdered and I murdered’.71 This double vision persists and in the autobiographical text Fluchtpunkt (1962) (Vanishing Point) Weiss poses the question of whether, having grown up in Germany during the 1930s with a father who was born a Jew, he belongs with the Nazis or with their victims. This perspective subsequently influences his remarks on the fine line between the defendants and the accused in the notes taken during his attendance at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial: ‘Essentially no great difference between guards and inmates –’.72 Although Weiss makes clear in Die Ermittlung (in the words of the third witness) that victims and perpetrators might conceivably have found themselves on different sides had circumstances been different, this is not to say that they are interchangeable.73 Weiss’s own imperative to bear witness is implicitly contrasted with the widespread reluctance of other writers and of the German population generally to confront the Nazi past. In one of the journalistic pieces which Weiss wrote for Stockholms Tidningen between June and August 1947, ‘The Literature of Darkness’, he describes how: ‘There are few who dare to look back. The past is covered by an oppressive darkness. Few dare to name the sinister illness that raged for many years, finally burning itself out and leaving behind a great wound which continually oozes blood.’74 Weiss’s diagnosis of German society is unchanged nearly twenty years later when he considers how Germans choose to live ‘in FORGETTING’.75 His early characterization of the Nazi past as a still-festering wound

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looks forward to Günter Grass’s ambition voiced in his 1999 Nobel Prize acceptance speech of ‘keeping the wound open’. Although Weiss is critical of Germany’s suppression of its Nazi past and of many specific aspects of German society, notebook entries from 1964 indicate that he does not suppose the Holocaust to have been a uniquely German event, but rather something that, given the right conditions, might have happened anywhere.76 He reaffirms this conviction in a subsequent interview.77 Weiss’s sense of his own status as a proxy witness to the Holocaust, by virtue of his having lived through the time in which it occurred as well as having potentially been both one of its victims and its perpetrators, is common to many of the other writers discussed in this book and is the primary impetus for Weiss’s writing of Die Ermittlung. In common with Paul Celan and Geoffrey Hill, Weiss admits to feeling guilty for not having suffered personally in the Holocaust.78 Characteristically, Weiss also feels guilt on the other side of the coin, for having avoided complicity with the Nazi regime through his family’s emigration, and the corresponding burden of guilt and punishment which would have been his lot as a German citizen.79 Weiss bears witness to the Holocaust in his essay ‘My Place’, written immediately following his visit to Auschwitz in December 1964 and first published in West Berlin the following year. He begins by listing the places in which he has lived and describes how none of them now seem to have any meaning for him when compared with one place in which he has spent only a single day. While this place remains distinct, features of the other places he has been are easily confused with one another. Weiss continues: Only this one place, which I have known about for a long time, but which I have only just seen, exists wholly for itself. It is a place which I was meant for and which I escaped. I myself have experienced nothing in this place. I have no other connection to it, except that my name was on the list of those who should have been moved there forever. I saw this place twenty years later. It is immutable. Its buildings cannot be mistaken for any other buildings.80 The name of the place is withheld until about a page into the text, when it is revealed to be Auschwitz. Weiss describes his arrival in the town by train and records his observations in the course of his visit to the Auschwitz ‘museum’ and camp in a halting prose. He recounts how

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the knowledge he has acquired of what happened at Auschwitz dissipates when he is confronted with the physical reality of the place.81 Within his catalogue of different aspects of the camp and account of the prisoners’ treatment Weiss acknowledges that ultimately ‘these words, these realizations, say nothing, explain nothing ... Nothing is left except for the total senselessness of their deaths’.82 Weiss’s text recognizes on the one hand the futility of visiting Auschwitz but concludes with the realization that, after all, ‘it is not yet over’.83 This sense of the necessary continuity of witness forms the imperative for his literary response to the Holocaust. Beckett and Weiss and Religion I will now consider Beckett’s and Weiss’s respective experiences of religion, and their views on the importance or otherwise of religious ideas in general, and on the conception of the testament in particular, for their work. Religion played a very different role in the upbringing of the two writers: Beckett was taken regularly to church by his mother while Weiss’s parents – his father was a Jew who converted to Christianity shortly after marrying his mother in a Jewish ceremony – did not regularly attend any form of public worship. Deirdre Bair’s account of Beckett’s childhood Christian observance refers to an interview in which he recalls his first Communion as his last significant religious experience. She goes on to quote from Tom Driver’s 1961 interview in which Beckett distances himself from organized religion: ‘My mother and brother got no value from their religion when they died. At the moment of crisis it has no more depth than an old school tie.’84 Beckett discusses his attitude to God in correspondence with Thomas McGreevy in 1935, during the time he spent living in London while undergoing psychoanalysis. He writes that he can accept neither the Catholic nor the Protestant conceptions of God, concluding that he must therefore find a reason for being within himself. Famously, when testifying in a libel case in Dublin in November 1937, Beckett responded to the question of whether he considers himself a Christian, Jew or atheist with a curt dismissal of all three positions: ‘None of the three’.85 Although both Beckett and Weiss are deeply cynical about the social and moral value of Christianity, it remains an unavoidable point of reference in Beckett’s work and is also a critical consideration in relation to those of Weiss’s dramatic works belonging to his project inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. The religious connotations of

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Beckett’s work have already been extensively analysed in numerous articles and many volumes of critical commentary.86 Bryden and Butler, in their introduction to a collection of papers dealing with Beckett and religion, observe that their subject ‘has constituted a recurrent strand of Beckett criticism from the earliest days’.87 The central contradiction with which all commentators wrestle is that of Beckett’s declared indifference to and even contempt for Christian belief, and the fact that his texts are simultaneously steeped in Christianity – loaded with both overt and nuanced references to aspects of Christian worship, diverse Christian writers and the Bible. Bair quotes Beckett in 1971 accounting for this contradiction himself: I am aware of Christian mythology … I have had the Bible read to me as a child, and have read the writings of others who were affected by it and who used it in one form or another. Like all literary devices, I use it where it suits me. But to say that I have been profoundly affected by it in daily reading or otherwise is utter nonsense.88 As Lance St John Butler puts it, ‘About religion Beckett is unambiguously ambiguous’.89 Birgitta Johansson describes how Beckett’s texts ‘play with boundaries between the sacred and the secular’.90 The most fruitful way to regard the Christian connection in Beckett’s work is to preserve an awareness of his far-reaching religious knowledge and simultaneous disavowal of this knowledge. One of the most perceptive reviews of the religious dimensions of Beckett’s texts is Mary Bryden’s 1998 book, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God. Bryden never loses sight of Beckett’s ambiguous stance in relation to Christianity, and claims that his texts could not do without their contested theism: the hypothesised God who emerges from Beckett’s texts is one who is both cursed for his perverse absence and cursed for his surveillant presence. He is by turns dismissed, satirised, or ignored, but he, and his tortured son, are never definitively discarded. If God is not apprehended in the here-and-now, there is nevertheless a perceived need, a potential opening, for a salvific function which a Deity could fulfil.91 Bryden’s account of Beckett’s God as absent but hypothetically present is like the relationship with God described by Imre Kertész and is

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characteristic of the theological orientation of much post-Holocaust writing. Bryden argues convincingly that Beckett’s texts are framed by an awareness of Christ having been and of an anticipated Final Coming or parousia, but lack any sense of the ongoing communion with Christ which occurs between these two events and forms the essence of Christian worship. She maintains that the views on art which Beckett expresses in his earliest critical writings correspond with his views on religion, so that the things he rejects in artistic practice illuminate what he rejects about religious practice. Bryden makes her argument via an extensive exegesis of the implications of the references to religion in Beckett’s review of Thomas McGreevy’s volume of poetry, Poems.92 Beckett writes that ‘All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer’.93 According to Bryden, Beckett associates this prayerful quality of poetic language with its visionary character, ultimately derived from an act of self-recognition.94 She does not elaborate on how this relates to Beckett’s idea, presented in the second half of his short article, that such moments of acute poetic perceptiveness entail the unity of language and its object, as when one of McGreevy’s poems culminates in a ‘blaze of prayer creating its object’.95 This idea is important in relation to my understanding of the testamentary quality of remembrance in Beckett’s dramatic texts, where, in accordance with J.L. Austin’s notion of performativity discussed in the previous chapter, the linguistic act comes to constitute the thing to which it is testifying. In Beckett’s play-texts the act of speaking itself can be interpreted as a testament to the Holocaust, even when what is said does not explicitly entail remembrance of the Holocaust. This is because of the ways in which his dramatic figures frequently seem to be speaking at the limits of linguistic communication, performing the turn described by Felman and Laub in which the ‘crisis of witnessing’ during the Holocaust is reflected as a literary crisis of address.96 The idea of the unity of form and content in good art is consistently important for Beckett since his assertion in his early essay on Joyce’s Work in Progress, published in 1929, that ‘Here form is content, content is form … His writing is not about something; it is that something itself … When the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep … When the sense is dancing, the words dance’.97 Hence, the speaking in Beckett’s play-texts is not so much about the difficulties of witnessing to the Holocaust, as it is those difficulties. What is particularly interesting in Beckett’s McGreevy review, however, is the religious dimension, so that prayer, the religious mode of attentiveness, is named as the context in which this linguistic union

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of form and content is achieved. My understanding of the testamentary remembrance of the Holocaust in Beckett’s drama applies this idea of unified form and content in relation to a different mode of religious communication and a correspondingly different literary genre, while acquiring a founding legitimacy from Beckett’s own statements on poetics. Bryden goes on to compare the religious references in the different phases of Beckett’s oeuvre, remarking that, ‘It is perhaps to be expected that, in the undefined and indefinable settings of Beckett’s drama and late prose – that space which is no space – the citing of outward observance, and of particular cultural or religious contexts, is much reduced’.98 This observation in no way precludes the testamentary act which does not necessarily depend upon explicit or implicit religious references in Beckett’s dramatic texts. Bryden’s observation that prayers in Beckett’s texts are not uttered in the expectation of a divine response so that ‘succour for human beings remains within human hands’99 also applies to the testamentary act. While Biblical testaments bear witness to God’s omnipotence, those of Beckett’s characters only point towards the impotence of ‘Omniomni, the all-unfuckable’.100 Bryden elaborates that, ‘This is a God who is either callously present, obtusely absent, or haplessly paralysed. Evidence of a hypothesis rumoured to be held by some – that of a loving Providence – remains unavailable to the Beckettian witness.’101 Bryden’s conception of Beckett’s dramatic figures as ‘witnesses’ to a damaged theological relationship points to the reformulation of the understanding of the covenant in post-Holocaust Judaism undertaken by Greenberg and others, and lends credence to my argument about the testamentary quality of Beckett’s drama. After the Holocaust, in Beckett’s play-texts, the precarious possibility of what is almost certainly only ever to be a secular salvation resides in the witness’s relationships with other people. My contention is that the origins of this possibility for intersubjective relation nonetheless derive from the testamentary model adapted from Judaeo-Christianity. Even though there is probably no God about whom to bear witness, the Biblical manner of bearing witness in the testamentary act retains a residual value because of the possibilities of intersubjective orientation – via the act of remembrance – which it establishes. There are numerous occasions in Beckett’s texts when words and linguistic acts are presented as substitutes for a religious faith which is no longer tenable. The testamentary act is sometimes explicitly discussed in this way, as in Beckett’s twelfth ‘Text for Nothing’. This

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is one of a group of thirteen short prose texts concerned with questions of identity, and the futility of existence and communication. The speakers in all the texts address another who might be someone entirely other or just another dimension of the self. At various points the texts toy with the idea of that ‘sweet thing theology’, in an ironic tone which is also wistful for that lost certainty of knowledge.102 Johansson interprets the eleventh text in terms of ‘the notion that human beings can never rule out the possibility of living by, through, and for a Deity’.103 A long passage in the twelfth text considers the meaning of existence in terms of a scrambled Judaeo-Christian theology. The speaker doubts whether a life conceived only in human terms can be worthwhile since the verification of any human construct of meaning would involve a chain of successive witnesses in an endless regression: ‘all the peoples of the earth would not suffice, at the end of the billions you’d need a god, unwitnessed witness of witnesses, what a blessing it’s all down the drain, nothing ever as much as begun, nothing ever but nothing and never, nothing ever but lifeless words’.104 The concept of God as a chief witness, an ‘unwitnessed witness of witnesses’, is the continually rejected hypothesis of divinity against which the testamentary dramatic act is sustained in Beckett’s work. In the Judaeo-Christian understanding of the testament, otherwise ‘lifeless words’ are transformed by the testamentary act into ‘a living voice – a message still being spoken’. In Felman and Laub’s study of the oral testimonies of Holocaust survivors, the ‘collapse of witnessing’ exemplified by the much-quoted lines from Celan’s poem ‘Aschenglorie’, ‘No one / bears witness for the / witness’, separates the experience of the Holocaust from that of other traumatic events.105 Laub refers to the absence of divine witness in his account of the failure of witnessing during the Holocaust.106 In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot the theologically inadequate act of bearing witness to God’s existence in the knowledge of ‘All the dead voices’ of the Holocaust is embodied in Lucky’s speech, which I consider in more detail in my discussion of the play-text below. Lucky’s tirade incorporates the radical doubt of post-Holocaust theology and becomes a testamentary context for the performative remembrance of the Holocaust. The testament is preserved by Beckett as a remnant mode of the expression of the Judaeo-Christian faith which it is also the means of contesting. Josephine Jacobsen and William R. Mueller’s 1966 study, The Testament of Samuel Beckett, has some ideas in common with those in this book, although fewer than the joint use of the word ‘testament’ might lead one to expect. Jacobsen and Mueller use ‘testament’ to refer

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in a general sense to Beckett’s ‘vision’ and do not elaborate on the implications of the word’s Judaeo-Christian significance, although they write perceptively on the sustained uncertainty involved in Beckett’s attitude to religion and the existence of God.107 The consequences of Beckett’s testamentary dramatic expression are hinted at in the authors’ perceptive description of his use of language: ‘that medium with which Beckett has contracted relations far more complex than those of communication or even soliloquy’.108 This recognition of a linguistic mode which is neither straightforwardly dialogic nor monologic is the basis for an understanding of the testamentary dramatic action as a fraught act of bearing witness but the authors do not develop their account in this direction, their main concern being to demonstrate that all Beckett’s work, regardless of its ostensible literary genre, is poetry. Although very little of the criticism treating Beckett and religious themes does so with explicit reference to post-Holocaust theology, this is the context specific to the twentieth century which most productively accounts for what is variously described as his ‘hypothesised God’, his ‘recurring preoccupation or obsession with the concept of nothingness’ and his ‘scenario of the irreducible “allegory” of the name of God’.109 Some critics do acknowledge the Holocaust as a cause for despair of God and religion in Beckett’s work. Jacobsen and Mueller do so obliquely when they defend Beckett against charges of ‘irresponsibility’ by insisting upon his rootedness in historical circumstances and his correspondingly acute sense of human suffering.110 In another implicit reference to the Holocaust, Colin Duckworth describes how ‘for Beckett the pain and suffering of innocent people had no moral value, and only served to prove God’s “divine athambia”’.111 Rosette C. Lamont posits the Holocaust as the counterpart to Lysander’s destruction of the Athenian fleet in 405 B.C. in terms of its effects on formal dramatic technique, accounting for Beckett’s recourse to the Aristophanic mode of the pnigos, or speededup recitation.112 William Hutchings gives an account of Lucky’s speech in the context of post-Holocaust theology.113 The questions in Beckett’s texts about the human struggle for a relationship with God, alongside the related questions about the limits of linguistic expression, are posed at least partly in response to the Holocaust, even though, as Carla Locatelli charts, Beckett began framing these questions at least as early as 1937.114 Peter Weiss’s literary response to the Holocaust is also bound up with his consideration of religion. Weiss stated unequivocally in an

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interview conducted in May 1967 that ‘I believe in neither religion, nor in any other form of redemption’.115 Weiss’s rejection of religion is inevitably connected with his having been a potential victim of the Holocaust on the grounds of his Jewish heritage, despite his having no demonstrable Jewish faith. Weiss recalls his father’s anxieties about his religious identity in a notebook entry from 1964.116 In a subsequent remark from a notebook he kept during 1972 Weiss wonders, ‘What are the Jews? Have no idea.’117 Weiss’s lack of religious feeling is commented on by Walter Wager, who interviewed him in New York in 1966.118 Religious belief in general is a negative construct for Weiss, as shown by an observation he makes as part of his preparatory notes for Die Ermittlung in 1964. Under the heading ‘INFERNO’ he describes German society and considers the possibility that the crimes of the Second World War may be connected to the need to believe in something, and particularly in a benevolent and just paternalistic figure.119 Like Beckett, Weiss views the religious impulse as part of man’s inevitable attempt to give his life meaning. In a notebook entry from 1964 Weiss speculates that when religion no longer satisfies, people turn to political systems such as fascism and communism,120 and similar observations recur in later notebooks from the 1970s.121 Weiss does on occasion recognize a possible theological interpretation of wartime suffering. In his account of his impressions of post-war Germany in ‘The Defeated’, Weiss describes the distorted features of those who are suffering, their faces ‘turned upwards in a screaming cry for a new God’.122 Weiss’s words articulate the position widely held among theologians that there is a need for a revised postHolocaust theology. It is not clear at this point in the text, however, whether Weiss is referring to those who suffered in the Holocaust or to the suffering German civilians whom he encounters in the bombedout cities. Weiss’s acknowledgement of the suffering experienced by German civilians – who he simultaneously and unequivocally regards as guilty – as well as those who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis, like his recognition of his own potential to have been involved on either side of the conflict, is remarkably ahead of its time. His depiction of suffering in theological terms at this point is interesting in relation to his subsequent preoccupation with the purgatorial and infernal structures of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which influences the organization of material in Die Ermittlung. Weiss’s reflection in ‘The Defeated’, referring to those who are left after the war that, ‘You don’t need any other belief other than the belief in yourself ’, reflects a posttheological conception which is inseparable from his interpretation of

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Dante’s text. 123 A similar idea recurs in a notebook entry from July 1963.124 Whenever Weiss contemplates theological issues, he is obliged to substitute human agency for divine power. Weiss’s most detailed accounts of his concerns about the compatibility of the Auschwitz subject matter with Dante’s religious and literary framework are put forward in two pieces written in the course of his preparatory work for Die Ermittlung: the prose-poem ‘Vorübung zum dreiteiligen Drama divina commedia’ (‘Study for threepart divina commedia drama’) and the essay ‘Gespräch über Dante’ (‘Conversation about Dante’), both published in 1965. Weiss’s ‘Study’ has been described by Olaf Berwald as a ‘poetological poem’.125 It wrestles with the challenge of responding to knowledge of the events of the Holocaust generally, and of formulating a literary response in particular – always in the context of Dante’s poem – in advance of his articulation of that response in Die Ermittlung. Weiss presents an extended comparison between Dante’s theological certainty about the respective fate of sinners and the innocent and his own secular moral outlook in relation to the Holocaust.126 Even though the tripartite structure of Die Ermittlung is inspired by that of The Divine Comedy, Weiss cannot adopt the theological categories of hell, purgatory and paradise which determine the structure of Dante’s poem, since these become meaningless within a worldview which can countenance ‘only the unique / here and now’. The actions and experiences of both victims and perpetrators, and the ongoing consequences of their behaviour, are grounded in the same material reality as that of the trial’s spectators: They belonged only to us, they belonged to no hell, to no paradise, they had grown up with us, and what they had done, what had befallen them, belonged to us.127 The ‘Study’ reflects on Weiss’s experience of attending sittings of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial and tries to posit the relative situations of the defendants and the accused in terms of the Dantean cosmic order. Such an exercise is bound to fail, since it is not possible to apply any of Dante’s categories to the victims of the Holocaust.128 Weiss terms Dante’s worldview a simplification (‘Vereinfachung’) but the extent to which he dwells upon the various classifications of punishment for sinners in The Divine Comedy, as well as upon other aspects of the system, nonetheless conveys a nostalgia for those lost

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theological convictions. Weiss’s literary response to the Holocaust endeavours to present a secular answer to the profound injustice of meaningless suffering perpetrated by people who may never face retribution for their actions. Although he inevitably rejects it, Weiss makes use of the Dantean moral-theological compass to orientate himself in relation to the immorality of the Holocaust. This simultaneous reliance upon and rejection of theological conceptual models and modes of expression is characteristic of all the authors discussed in this book and reflects the broader pattern of reinterpreting Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance, largely stripped of their religious content, to articulate remembrance of the Holocaust and thereby to establish possibilities for an intertextual reorientation of the speaker in relation to their addressee. The ‘Study’ describes the process of composition of Die Ermittlung and provides insight as to how Weiss comes to regard testamentary dramatic utterance as the most appropriate literary remembrance of the Holocaust. Weiss is rendered speechless by his attempts to imagine the events described during the Auschwitz trial. He compares Dante’s ability to use art to find the words for describing people’s sufferings with his own incapacity to do the same for the victims of the Holocaust. Weiss feels that the mass of resources to which he has access, including the ‘faltering testimonies of a few survivors’,129 are still not adequate to the task of formulating a literary response to what happened. He remains committed to his plan of somehow ordering all the material within the framework of the Divine Comedy. Weiss’s account of the conditions under which artistic creation may be possible in the post-Holocaust ‘Paradiso’, a heavily modified version of Dante’s Paradise, involves a minimalist theatrical presentation of disembodied living voices which is strongly reminiscent of Beckett’s later dramas and informs his testamentary conception of Die Ermittlung: …he [the artist] has nothing but the reality of words, that are still pronounceable, and it is a duty to find these words and to let them live, in the absolute emptiness. But how? Just as voices, in the dark, or in blinding light, without mouths, without faces, disembodied, but wouldn’t this also just be an illusion? Spoken perhaps by witnesses, just as I saw them, before the court, coming forward one by one,

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looking in their memories for traces from the time in which they were selected, for paradisiacal existence, as the last one, still allowed to speak, and after which there would only be the final silence?130 For Weiss then, as well as for Beckett, what remains of religion and of art after the Holocaust is the residual testamentary act, performed by witnesses to the disaster, both in memoriam and against forgetting to remember. Testament as Literary Form Weiss and Beckett’s methodological statements are illuminating for the consideration of their drama as testament. While this study focuses on specific dramatic works, both authors worked extensively within other literary genres, and, in Weiss’s case, even other artistic media. Weiss did not devote himself primarily to literary writing until after 1960, until which time he largely produced paintings and films, and he continued to work with graphic media even after this point.131 Writing in his notebook in December 1961, Weiss describes how he likes to work within multiple artistic media.132 By November of 1964 he expresses a preference for working within the dramatic literary genre because of the possibility it offers for combining ‘the visual and verbal aspects of life’.133 When asked about his switch from prose to dramatic writing in an interview conducted in May 1965, Weiss describes his progressive discovery of the possibilities of dialogue and conversation.134 In a subsequent interview he describes his ‘subjective novels’ as integral to his development as a writer, since they ‘made it possible for me to arrive at a form of theatre that was better able to capture reality’.135 Weiss accounts for his new-found preference for the dramatic medium in a 1964 interview, ‘because everything there is immediately alive’.136 He elaborates on his experience of the differences between writing prose and dramatic texts: ‘When I am writing a book I sit still in my room. The writing is an expression of my isolation and the feeling of not belonging anywhere. But as soon as I am writing for the stage, I come alive.’137 In the same interview Weiss describes the theatrical medium as ‘more alive than film’,138 indicating that it is live dramatic performance in which the speaker testifies before an audience that shares his physical and temporal space, rather than the recorded

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speech-act, which for him constitutes the most compelling aesthetic model. Just as the religious conception of the testamentary act understands it as the articulation of ‘a living voice’, so too the aesthetic association of the testament with the dramatic literary genre entails a sense of its – literal or intertextual – performative dimension. Hartman, discussing the value of the video as the mode of recording the survivors’ testimonies at the Yale archive, accounts for the dramatic significance of this testimonial context: ‘While in drama the eye comes back to some extent, in non-drama … it doesn’t except through an imaginative effort – an effort that is necessary to respond to the intensity of the printed word’.139 Weiss’s account of the enlivening process of dramatic composition and performance has to do with precisely those testamentary qualities which constitute the ongoing act of remembrance of the Holocaust in Die Ermittlung. Weiss insists upon a precise relationship between literary form and content: ‘The form follows from the material’.140 His remarks echo Beckett’s reflection on Joyce’s work, discussed above, that ‘Here form is content, content is form’.141 Adorno makes a similar point in Ästhetische Theorie (Aesthetic Theory) when he claims that ‘aesthetic form is sedimented content’.142 In his essay on Endgame in which he considers the nature of its response to the Holocaust, Adorno elaborates on how this connection between form and content specifically applies to Beckett’s text in terms of a dialectical relation between the establishment of meaning and insistence of the absence of meaning.143 For Weiss and Beckett, the need to respond to the Holocaust is inextricably linked with the act of bearing witness, in which, as accounts of Holocaust survivor testimony demonstrate, the substance of what is said is largely constituted by the act of testifying itself.144 Laub describes how ‘What ultimately matters in all processes of witnessing, spasmodic and continuous, conscious and unconscious, is not simply the information, the establishment of the facts, but the experience itself of living through testimony, of giving testimony’.145 An entry from Weiss’s notebook dated January 1964 reflects on the responsibility to bear witness to the Holocaust: ‘On the “Final Solution”: it is only our generation that knows something about it, the generation after us already doesn’t know. We must say something about it. But we cannot do it yet. Whenever we try, it fails.’146 Even though Beckett’s dramatic figures never describe what happened during the Holocaust, or even say that it has happened, their acts of speech are nonetheless predicated on the awareness of being after those events. Their speaking is always in the context of what Estragon in Waiting

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for Godot terms ‘All the dead voices’.147 Weiss’s and Beckett’s playtexts respond to the Holocaust by dramatizing the sense of a testimonial imperative which is always being thwarted by the overburdening awareness of ‘living through’ the voices of the dead; this is evident in the persistent failure of the speakers’ testamentary acts to contract adequate theological or linguistic relations. Beckett discusses his different experiences of composing prose and drama in a conversation with Mel Gussow in 1978, subsequently documented by Gussow: ‘comparing plays to fiction, he said that he liked “the limitations of theatre as compared to the non-limitations of prose. I turned to theatre as relief – from the blackness of prose.” After fiction, “theatre was the light”. Glumly, he added, “Then it became its own darkness”.’148 One way of accounting for ‘the limitations of theatre as compared to the non-limitations of prose’ is the requirement, in most cases, that the dramatic text be spoken. In this context the limitations of theatre are related to the limitations of what it is possible to say. For Beckett the testamentary possibility is located at the boundary between speech and silence, i.e. the limits not just of what can be said, but of the act of saying itself, which is also what most of his plays are ‘about’. As John Leeland Kundert-Gibbs observes, one point of consensus in the vast body of Beckett criticism is that ‘Beckett’s work is more exposition than explanation’.149 Performances of Beckett’s dramatic texts enact their own limitations, including their testamentary limitations. The dramatic texts to be considered here by Weiss and Beckett aim to testify in a way which perpetuates remembrance of the Holocaust, even if, in Beckett’s case, remembrance is more commonly figured as forgetting to remember. In Waiting for Godot Vladimir summarizes the expectation of posthumous oblivion under which Beckett’s figures invariably suffer: ‘To every man his little cross. [He sighs.] Till he dies. [Afterthought.] And is forgotten.’150 In Die Ermittlung, which is largely composed of accumulated pieces of witness testimony from the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial which it restages, the Holocaust is more obviously the object of the testamentary remembrance than in Waiting for Godot. Beckett’s play, by contrast, and his oeuvre generally, is not about the events of the Holocaust, but nevertheless demands to be understood in the post-Holocaust context because of its dramatization of the fraught circumstances of any act of bearing witness after it. Like many survivor testimonies, the dramatic testamentary acts emerge against a background of doubt about their own sufficiency, or even doubt about the possibility of utterance in the first place. As Simon

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Critchley writes, quoting the famous ending of Beckett’s novel The Unnamable (1953), ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’, ‘the double bind or negative dialectic within which Beckett’s work moves in that between the inability to speak and the inability to be silent’.151 As in the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, remembrance is performed in Beckett’s work through the very act of testifying, almost regardless of what is being testified. There is a sense that, after the Holocaust, any speech-act is always articulated against the odds. As the protagonist of The Unnamable says, ‘I have no voice and must speak, that is all I know, it’s round that I must revolve, of that I must speak’.152 The memorial imperative to bear witness pertains in Beckett’s texts to the act of witnessing itself: ‘if I could remember what I have said I could repeat it, if I could learn something by heart I’d be saved, I have to keep on saying the same thing and each time it’s an effort’.153 Weiss expresses concerns regarding the efficacy of literary witnessing in his first published notebook from 1960: ‘What do I want to say, and why do I want to say anything, when I accept in any case that what I say will change nothing? Is it possible to extend one’s own borders and to arrive at a place where a statement will be productive?’154 His ongoing anxieties about the orientation of his literary address are embodied in the rhetorical question: ‘To whom am I really speaking?’155 A more radical version of this question is posed by the narrator of Beckett’s The Unnamable, who is uncertain even about who is speaking: ‘who is holding forth at the moment? And to whom? And about what?’156 Similar enquiries are made by many of Beckett’s dramatic protagonists. Weiss’s and Beckett’s views on the requirement for a literal audience for their plays substantially differ, however. In an interview with Jean Tailleur conducted in 1966, Weiss describes the profound importance to him of the assurance that came with his belated success as an author that he had finally found a readership and banished the sense of writing into a void.157 The aim of his drama is to make the testamentary act bear fruit by means of the ethical orientation which it makes possible for its audience. Weiss elaborates on the effects he hopes his drama will have upon its audience in a 1968 interview, envisaging that by listening to the dramatic testaments of remembrance members of the audience themselves may be induced to reflect and remember.158 Beckett, on the other hand, describes in a 1956 letter to the director Alan Schneider how ‘Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me, in fact I feel more at home with the latter.’159 In the same letter he comments on how if his own instructions for the staging of his plays

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are followed they tend to drive audiences away. The dramatic testaments, like survivor testimonies, must be witnessed in some way for them to be meaningful, however. Whereas within Weiss’s Marxist agenda, the dramatic testament is envisaged as having a role in reallife social transformation and needs to be witnessed by a theatre-going audience, for Beckett, the primary location of the testamentary act and its witnessing is intertextual. Beckett implicitly has lower expectations of the possibility for post-Auschwitz cultural transformation than Weiss. As Adorno writes of Endgame, ‘Beckett’s dustbins are symbols of the culture that has been reconstructed after Auschwitz’.160 Weiss and Beckett’s remembrance of the Holocaust operates within different frameworks of authorial intention, but without their respective concerns for and about the real and intertextual addressees, the address of the testamentary acts themselves would scarcely be possible. Weiss is renowned in literary history as the inventor of a particular dramatic technique known as documentary theatre, of which Die Ermittlung is the foremost example. Manfred Haiduk suggests that Weiss’s own literary output prior to Marat/Sade, consisting predominantly of autobiographical prose, as well as his experience of making documentary films, predisposed him towards the documentary approach to drama.161 Weiss’s 1968 essay, ‘Notizen zum dokumentarischen Theater’ (‘Notes on documentary theatre’), is a programmatic statement of what he was trying to achieve within this theatrical medium and offers insights into the affinities between the documentary style and the testament. Weiss’s list, in the first ‘note’, of the diverse resources upon which documentary theatre may draw includes explicitly testamentary material.162 According to Weiss, the innovation of documentary theatre is essentially a formal one: ‘it takes authentic material and presents it again – its content unchanged – from the stage’.163 The testimony is one of the modes of presentation which can be employed within the broader documentary approach, and may be a straightforward transposition of the source material or may constitute the re-working of form which Weiss regards as central to the documentary technique. Weiss describes how documentary theatre functions to bring together material relating to a specific issue and to focus the relevant arguments.164 His description emphasizes the potential for testamentary aspects within the documentary organization of the dramatic material, since the systematic presentation of opposing points of view prior to a final judgement inevitably evokes the courtroom situation, where defendants and accused are each given the

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opportunity to make a testimony in which they state their respective cases. Manfred Haiduk points out the congruity between the tribunals frequently staged as part of documentary theatre productions and Schiller’s conception of the theatre as the arbitrator of an independent moral justice.165 For Weiss, the act of testifying serves as a means of orientation whereby, ‘The parties stand opposite one another. The interdependencies between them are illuminated.’166 Testamentary expression, then, is one of the ways in which fraught social and political interrelationships are elucidated in documentary theatre. In Die Ermittlung, this orientation in relation to the historical circumstances is connected to the ethical orientation which is also derived from the testamentary act as a form of response to and remembrance of the Holocaust. Weiss’s sense of documentary theatre as a public, declarative mode, performed before and on behalf of others, refers to its testamentary aspect in which ‘Individual speakers stand before a majority of speakers’167 and where the figures on stage ‘are mouthpieces for many people’.168 The structures of address in testamentary theatre contrast with those entailed by other forms of literary response to the Holocaust, notably the private, one-to-one exchange in confessional poetry. Weiss recognizes that the documentary stage cannot recreate the conditions of the great historical trials, including the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, but it can shed new light on the witnesses’ testimonial statements.169 Again, the documentary theatre’s contribution is portrayed in terms of its reformulation of historical testimony or ‘Aussage’. As I showed in the consideration of Weiss’s attitude to religion in the previous section, the 1965 ‘Study’ as well as notebook entries from this time provide numerous insights into the formal development of Die Ermittlung, which is always considered in terms of the formal organization of Dante’s poem and is thus inseparable from the latter’s theological context. These notes reflect Weiss’s concern to combine structural aspects of Dante’s Divine Comedy with a dramatic documentary testament to the events of the Holocaust. The testamentary form of remembrance of the Holocaust in Weiss’s play is derived from both its theological framework and its documentary context. A notebook entry by Weiss from 1964 imagines a scene in which Dante and Giotto are confronted with the concentration camps and consider the possibility of their being documented in literature, only to fall silent.170 Weiss subsequently describes how it is precisely this overwhelming temptation towards silence that the artist must resist in

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order to fulfil his testamentary obligation: ‘If he were to let himself be overwhelmed by events, he would not be able to speak anymore’.171 In Beckett’s Endgame, Hamm describes the visions of an acquaintance of his in terms which evoke the apocalyptic aftermath of the Nazi camps: I once knew a madman who thought the end of the world had come. He was a painter – and engraver. I had a great fondness for him. I used to go and see him, in the asylum. I’d take him by the hand and drag him to the window. Look! There! All that rising corn! And there! Look! The sails of the herring fleet! All that loveliness! [Pause.] He’d snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes. [Pause.] He alone had been spared. [Pause.] Forgotten. [Pause.] It appears the case is … was not so … so unusual.172 As in Weiss’s sketch of Dante and Giotto, the painter in Endgame does not have words to describe what he has seen – Hamm must supply the account of the vision of ashes on his behalf. Significantly, in Beckett’s text, the painter is also a survivor of a destructive event of which only ashes remain. His madness and dejection appear to be derived not only from what he has witnessed, but from the sense that he, and by implication his involvement in the destruction, has been forgotten. The testamentary act in Beckett’s drama restores a possibility of remembrance. For Weiss and Beckett, in parallel with the Holocaust survivor’s testimony, the literary testamentary act may be fraught with difficulty and always set against the temptation of silence. What remains is to summon the resources to stage the testamentary address. Both Beckett and Weiss point to the primary significance of words rather than action within the construction of their respective literary responses to the Holocaust, despite the fact that, as Weiss writes, ‘It was said for a long time that these things were not expressible in words’.173 Beckett’s protagonist in The Unnamable characterizes his predicament as being ‘To testify to them, until I die’, where ‘their’ identity remains obscure in the circular ramblings which constitute the narrative.174 Weiss discusses his reliance on words in an account of the differences in dramatic style between Marat/Sade and Die Ermittlung.175 Words are the basis of the testamentary act, which dominates the stage presentation in documentary theatre. For Weiss, this dependence on ‘the word’ is connected with the fundamental impossibility of adequately portraying on stage the conditions at Auschwitz, or indeed at any of the innumerable places where suffering

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and death were inflicted during the Holocaust,176 and the testament is thus perceived as the most appropriate form of literary response to what happened. Although the characters in Weiss’s and Beckett’s play-texts are only indirectly bearing witness, and the actors who play those characters are at a further remove from the authentic witnessing of the Holocaust survivor, their speech is nonetheless addressed to others – onstage and in the audience – and as such participates in Levinas’s sense of an ethical act of speaking. Felman and Laub describe how, in both literal and literary acts of Holocaust testimony, the traumatic past is figured to the person who reads or listens as ‘history which is essentially not over’. For the survivor of trauma, the traumatic event ‘continues into the present and is current in every respect’.177 Langer identifies how the impossibility for the person who listens to survivor testimony fully to know what happened during the Holocaust results in a requirement of the listener to enter into the present act of remembrance: ‘In the presence of their anguished memory, we are asked to share less what is recovered than the process of recall itself.’178 Langer goes on to describe how in their testimonies, witnesses ‘are concerned less with the past than with a sense of that past in the present’.179 Weiss characterizes Die Ermittlung in the same terms: ‘so it is not portrayal of the past, but portrayal of the present, in which the past comes alive again’.180 In Beckett’s texts the past is scarcely referred to in the present, other than in terms of its ‘dead voices’ and ‘ashes’, but the testamentary acts of bearing witness to the residual possibility of communication itself are predicated on what happened during the Holocaust. Weiss and Beckett’s play-texts dramatize the psychoanalytic sense of the traumatic recurrence of the past in the present in testimonial acts which enact their own memorial process. The religious understanding of the testamentary act of remembrance as Vergegenwärtigung in which worshippers become eye-witnesses to their own history applies to the response to the Holocaust in Die Ermittlung. Spectators of Beckett’s play-texts become witnesses to the forgetting to remember of history; by virtue of the ongoing testamentary address itself, however, the Holocaust is neither adequately remembered nor truly forgotten. Die Ermittlung Weiss elaborates on his motivation for writing Die Ermittlung and on its perspective in relation to the Holocaust in a 1965 interview:

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I wrote the play in order to make the meaning of the Frankfurt Auschwitz-Trial clearer to myself. The concentration camp itself does not appear in the play; we look back on it from the perspective of the present, like those who took part in the actual hearings. I attended the hearings for many days and the play itself is based entirely upon reports of the trial.181 Die Ermittlung is thus a reflection of Weiss’s experience of observing the participants in the Frankfurt trial bear witness to the Holocaust. It is based on witnesses’ testimony from 1964–65 and Weiss’s perception of that testimony, rather than on his own wartime experiences, although, as I have shown, these inevitably inform his literary position. In what follows I will investigate how the testamentary act works in the play in the context of the discussions in the preceding sections concerning its Judaeo-Christian and literary significance. First I will consider some of the critical responses to Die Ermittlung and show how these might be related to various ways of understanding Weiss’s drama as testamentary. Rosenfeld’s damning analysis of Die Ermittlung condemns what he sees as Weiss’s ‘adaptation’ of the Holocaust for political ends as a moral and artistic failure.182 He criticizes the reductive inadequacy of Weiss’s ‘explanation’ of Nazism in terms of capitalism, as well as his assertion that the roles of the prisoners and guards in Auschwitz might easily have been reversed.183 Rosenfeld interprets the unemotional language in Die Ermittlung as a distortion of the actual language used during the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial and as a denial of the specificity of the German perpetrators and Jewish victims of the Holocaust. His account of the play acknowledges its strength as ‘a stylized but otherwise faithful transcription of testimony at the Auschwitz trials’,184 and recognizes the periodic validity of Weiss’s judgement as a spectator at the trial, as well as the personal cost to him in writing the text, but his final condemnation rests on the impression he has after watching the play that Weiss has never imagined the dead to have been alive.185 Rosenfeld’s central concern regarding Weiss’s play can be interpreted as a concern about Weiss’s drama as an act of testament. The Biblical testament is defined by its relation as ‘a living voice – a message still being spoken’ in an ongoing act of witness to the living.186 The concerns cited above regarding the terminology of ‘testament’ and ‘covenant’ in Christian usage are based upon the respective connotations of each as voices ‘from one who is gone’ or ‘with one who is alive’.187 For Rosenfeld, Die Ermittlung speaks from the dead when its proper voice ought to include their once living voices.

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W.G. Sebald forms a different judgement of Die Ermittlung in his 1986 essay ‘Die Zerknirschung des Herzens – Über Erinnerung und Grausamkeit im Werk von Peter Weiss’ (‘The Remorse of the Heart – On Memory and Cruelty in the Work of Peter Weiss’). Sebald situates Weiss’s oeuvre in the context of a sympathetic view of his difficult upbringing and personal circumstances, and of his doubly fraught German and Jewish identities. Sebald takes account of the reflections and methodological statements in Weiss’s notebooks which are largely overlooked by Rosenfeld, as well as Weiss’s aim of structuring the playtext according to Dante’s Divine Comedy. He observes that ‘All his work is designed as a visit to the dead: first his own dead … and then all the other victims of history who are now dust and ashes’.188 Unlike Rosenfeld, however, Sebald interprets Weiss’s literary writing as far removed from ‘abstract memory of the dead’ by virtue of its sympathetic ‘study and reconstruction of an actual time of torment’ of those who died.189 Sebald sees Weiss’s personal investment in and suffering through his writing – also noted by Rosenfeld – as the ultimate commitment to remembrance. Indeed Sebald alludes to the way in which the writing of Weiss’s final magnum opus, his huge novel, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, literally exhausted him beyond the possibility of recovery.190 For Sebald, then, Weiss’s literary output is an extended reflection upon living with the dead (in Weiss’s words, ‘with all our dead within us’) which forms his own self-destructive testament.191 Klaus L. Berghahn interprets the Dantean organization of Die Ermittlung as an overt reliance on Christian symbolism and describes how ‘The play’s subtle irony is revealed in the way Weiss plays with this Christian typology and stages the oratorio as a passion play of Jewish suffering’.192 Berghahn’s subsequent summary of the differing reactions to the play in Germany and America rather contradicts his account of it here, since he focuses on the way in which Weiss’s lack of acknowledgement of specifically Jewish suffering was overlooked by the vast majority of German critics, whereas it caused widespread consternation in the play’s American reception.193 In an earlier essay in which he discusses the dialectical opposition between past and present set up by documentary literature, Berghahn describes the operation of Weiss’s play-text in terms of a process of Vergegenwärtigung whereby ‘the actualization of the past [serves] the critique of the present’.194 While contemporary audiences generally missed Weiss’s message about the continuity between the Nazi past and the present, they were forced to confront the facts of the Holocaust – as eyewitnesses – in a way which had not been demanded by most previous attempts to represent it on stage.195

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Each of the three critical assessments of Die Ermittlung discussed above focuses on a different aspect of Weiss’s testamentary drama. Rosenfeld’s censure of the play is founded on his view that it is only a lifeless testament of the dead, rather than a response to the lives of the Jewish victims. Sebald admires the way in which Weiss dedicates himself to the memory of the dead to the extent that his writing becomes his own testament. Berghahn discusses Die Ermittlung in terms of the Christian response to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust and characterizes Weiss’s aims in writing the play in terms of producing a critical actualization of the past. I want to extend Berghahn’s perspective by showing how the play’s actualizing testamentary remembrance is entailed by its dramatic structure of address, or its way of ‘saying’. Die Ermittlung articulates the sufferings of the victims of the Holocaust in a more literal way than any of the other literary texts considered in this book. Weiss’s play is not just about the Holocaust, however, but portrays the relationship between the Holocaust and language as this is revealed in the testamentary act, in the context of the Christian-theological framework which structures the text. While the anxieties Weiss records in his notebooks regarding the possibility of saying anything which adequately responds to the Holocaust, discussed above, sometimes sound remarkably like Beckett’s concise formulation of the post-Holocaust artistic imperative as ‘The expression that there is nothing to express’ etc., his arrangement of testimony from the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial into a play-text which is usually considered too long for a single dramatic performance seems to contradict these kind of abstract concerns about the limitations of linguistic expression. Cohen notes that a complete staging of the play would require ‘three theatre evenings’.196 Hartman’s consideration of the proliferation of Holocaust survivor testimonies deals with the same paradox: ‘The volume of testimonies is remarkable; it not only contradicts the notion of the Holocaust as an inexpressible experience (though that remains an emotional truth) but creates an internally complex field of study.’197 The quantity of testimony about Auschwitz in Die Ermittlung, its scarcely bearable litany of accumulated suffering combined with the repeated attempts by the accused to deny or evade responsibility for that suffering, points rather to there being a surfeit of things to express and ways of expressing them in relation to the Holocaust, which is of course part of the point Weiss wants to make. Weiss’s dilemma is that on the one hand, whatever you say about Auschwitz, there is still more that could be said, and on the other hand,

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whatever and however much you say about Auschwitz, nothing that could be said is adequate to what happened. Laub explains that for the survivor, ‘There are never enough words or the right words, there is never enough time or the right time, and never enough listening or the right listening to articulate the story that cannot be fully captured in thought, memory and speech.’198 Felman and Laub identify the capacity of literary responses to the Holocaust to thematize precisely this ‘crisis of witnessing’. Die Ermittlung dramatizes the apparent contradiction between Weiss’s statements regarding the impossibility of ‘saying’ in response to the Holocaust and the extent of what it is ‘said’ about the Holocaust in the play itself. Whereas Beckett – and the critical project of deconstruction – extends this dilemma into the possibility of linguistic referentiality per se, Weiss’s attention stays with the possibility of testifying to the Holocaust and other historical events. These concerns clearly relate to Levinas’s distinction between the saying and the said where, in contrast to the inevitable reductiveness of what can be said, only the act of saying to another approaches an adequate ethical relation to them. As I observed above, the acts of saying in Weiss’s play-text are addressed not only to their intertextual addressees, but explicitly also to the actual audience sitting in the theatre, who are to be eyewitnesses to the staged proceedings of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. This aspect of the dramatic form of address is often noted in relation to the statements of the third witness, whom Weiss uses as a mouthpiece for his own views.199 In the play’s first canto, ‘The Loading Ramp’, in which witnesses describe their arrival at Auschwitz and the accused supposedly account for their roles in the selection process, Witness 8 tells of the killing of a newborn child: During the unloading a child was born I wrapped it in some clothes and laid it next to the mother Baretzki came up to me with a stick and hit me and the woman What are you doing with that muck there he shouted and gave the child a kick so that it flew for 10 yards Then he ordered me Bring that shit here The child was dead then200

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Such experiences are recounted in the oral testimonies of Holocaust survivors in the Yale archive.201 Christopher Bigsby observes in relation to this episode in Weiss’s play how ‘it is precisely the unemotional recitation of fact that generates the emotion’ for the spectating audience.202 Much later in the play, in the fourth canto, Witness 4 is questioned about the medical experiments to which women in the camp were subjected. Among a series of torturous procedures, she describes how artificial inseminations were carried out, only for the resulting pregnancies to be terminated at seven months: ‘If there was a scrap of life in the child / after the premature birth / it was murdered and there was an autopsy’.203 Whereas in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Pozzo’s reflection that ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more’,204 can be read as a symbolic description of the futility of human existence, Weiss’s play remembers actual events in which babies are murdered within moments of being born. Pozzo, watched by the audience, addresses his interlocutors Vladimir and Estragon with his wry and only half-serious profundity. The witnesses’ acts of saying in Die Ermittlung directly address the members of the audience, who thereby themselves become witnesses to the witnesses of brutal infanticides. In both Die Ermittlung and Waiting for Godot, the testamentary act constitutes the theatrical performance. Weiss’s play has periodically been discussed in terms of Beckett’s dramatic style. Roger Ellis notes how ‘Characters seemed caught up in some fatalistic limbo reminiscent of Beckett or the nightmares of surrealist writers’.205 On the other hand, Robert Cohen discusses the third witness’s warning that something like the Holocaust could happen again as an urgent call to reject what might be read as a typically Beckettian attitude ‘of an indifferent or hopeless waiting for the end’, in order ‘to make use of the opportunities for individual action that are available to us’.206 Die Ermittlung is a visually static play but the acts of saying in the playtext provide it with a continuing, assaulting momentum when the content of what is said would otherwise arrest performers and audience alike in speechless, appalled contemplation, as the audience’s silent reactions after early performances of the play demonstrate. The anonymity of the witnesses throughout the play-text, who are not even designated as Jews, stands in contrast to the naming of the defendants. Weiss’s intention was to portray universalized suffering in Die Ermittlung, but this aspect of his treatment of the trial material has been highly controversial. When Weiss’s personal experiences are taken into account, however, including his ongoing struggle with the

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semi-rhetorical question of whether he should consider himself as a potential victim or a potential perpetrator of the Holocaust, the absence of specificity in the midst of such painstakingly detailed suffering can be viewed more sympathetically. Weiss’s decision to depict the witnesses anonymously reflects his desire for attention to be directed towards the act of saying itself, rather than to who is doing the saying, as well as his aim for the dramatic testament to extend beyond its intertextual dimension to address the audience. Even though he is politically intent on emphasizing the contemporary audience’s complicity with what happened during the Holocaust by virtue of their ongoing acquiescence to economic conditions which remain unchanged, Weiss does not take the morally dubious step of universalizing the perpetrators’ guilt by avoiding the use of their German names in the play-text (although the accused are only referred to numerically in the script’s indications of who is speaking). Weiss’s universalization of suffering in the play in the interests of conveying a political message takes place at the expense of sensitivity to particular suffering, especially that of the Jewish majority who suffered and died in the Holocaust. This does not necessarily mean that Jewish suffering is excluded from the play, however, as Berghahn’s discussion of the Dantean-Christian structure in relation to Jewish persecution suggests.207 In fact an indirect reference to the Jewish identity of many of the camp’s victims occurs in Witness 7’s testimony in ‘The Song of S.S. Corporal Stark’. The witness describes Stark’s overseeing of the gas chambers and his way of shooting prisoners in the legs before shooting them dead. In the witness’s account, Stark refers abusively to one of his female victims as ‘Sarah’, the Nazis’ generic name for Jewish women.208 Jews are clearly referred to, although without being named as such, in Stark’s subsequent attempt at self-justification: Every third word at school was about them – whose fault everything was and who had to be wiped out.209 In the play’s closing section the third witness’s reckoning of the total number of war victims refers to the six million ‘murdered for racist reasons’.210 While Jews are not explicitly present in the play-text, they are far from absent from it.

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In contrast to the non-naming of Judaism in the play-text, there are numerous allusions to Christianity. Christianity is implicated in responsibility for the Holocaust in the words of the defendant Lucas in the first canto as he attempts simultaneously to deny and to excuse his involvement: I have said over and over again that I am a doctor to preserve human lives not to destroy people And my Catholic faith wouldn’t permit anything else.211 Instead of unequivocally precluding participation in the murderous organization of the camp, Christianity is shown to accommodate the self-interested behaviour of its adherents and thus implicitly to condone the persecution and murder of the camp’s inmates, including the Jews. Lucas continues his shabby self-defence with a further attempt to appeal to Christian moral authority: While on leave I even spoke to an archbishop friend, as well as to a top lawyer Both of them said to me that immoral orders should not be followed although it was not necessary to endanger one’s own life in the process we were at war and there was a lot going on there.212 The Christian faith of the defendants is highlighted again in the second song when Witness 9 describes how Bednarek used to pray in his room after killing a prisoner.213 Bednarek’s response – in which in eight short lines he acknowledges his faith in God but denies having prayed in the camps for fear of the informers, then denies having killed anybody, before admitting after all to a single murder – demonstrates the twisted logic according to which the defendants were able to maintain their faith despite their conduct in the camps. The prisoners’ grimly ironic nickname for the particularly cruel guard Kaduk, ‘Holy Dr Kaduk’, who made his own arbitrary selections condemning prisoners to death, makes a justified mockery of Christian notions of sanctity in such circumstances.214 In the third canto, Witness 8 describes how Boger

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sarcastically employed Christian terminology in remarking, after having tortured him: ‘Now we have prepared you / for ascension’.215 The Christian calendar is shown to have retained some significance in the camp when, in the eighth canto, Witness 8 recounts how at Christmas 1942 the defendant Klehr undertook to kill forty prisoners by injecting them with phenol and received a special extra ration as a reward. Klehr’s attempt to deny what happened centres on his claim that he always went home for Christmas.216 The play persistently exposes the hypocrisy of the defendants’ Christian values. Die Ermittlung demonstrates Weiss’s awareness, shared by George Steiner in his introduction to Language and Silence written in 1966, the year after Weiss’s play, that the longstanding humanist faith in the edifying powers of culture is no longer tenable after the Holocaust. Steiner refers to the guards at Auschwitz who would read Goethe and Rilke or play Bach and Schubert after a day’s work in the camp.217 In Weiss’s play, the eighth witness describes how the defendant Stark interrupted a discussion about Goethe’s humanism in order to execute a woman and her two children.218 Weiss extends this reflection on the ultimate powerlessness of culture to prevent human barbarity to a critique of the religious culture of Christianity, which is shown in the play-text to function as just another linguistic habit, or worse, as a source of perverse self-justification for several of the defendants. He aims, via a direct address to his audience, to bring them to a realization of the complicity of cultural and religious values in the perpetration of the Holocaust. But the fact that Weiss chooses to articulate this in a literary form, albeit a novel one, nonetheless demonstrates a residual faith in culture. Furthermore, Weiss’s ideological agenda in the playtext is based on his conviction at least of the possibility for meaningful social and cultural transformation after the Holocaust. Steiner suggests that what is required of the humanities, after the Holocaust, is a new philosophy of language which will take account of ‘the particular inheritance and partial desolation of our culture’.219 He calls for the literary-linguistic equivalent of Greenberg’s postHolocaust theological model of the ‘voluntary covenant’. The accumulated testimony in Die Ermittlung constitutes part of Weiss’s literary response to what is involved in Steiner’s demand. Another possible sense of the way in which Weiss’s play manifests a dual logic of inheritance and loss after the Holocaust is encapsulated in Otto F. Best’s apt description of Die Ermittlung as ‘a “theocentric parable” without a God’.220 Best’s phrase describes how, even in His absence, God remains a point of orientation in the play, via, for example, its

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Dantean organization and the Christian references in the prevaricating statements of the accused. My contention that Weiss’s dramatic response to the Holocaust entails a connection with the Judaeo-Christian mode of testamentary remembrance in its evocation of ‘a living voice – a message still being spoken’ extends this interpretation. Weiss’s distinctly secular aim of re-staging the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial so as to actualize the past in the present with the aim of realizing a corresponding change in the consciousness and behaviour of his audience reinterprets the Biblical act of actualizing testamentary remembrance in which participants become eye-witnesses to historical events. The ongoing testamentary acts that constitute Weiss’s and Beckett’s play-texts are also a means of instantiating a renewed possibility for ethical intersubjective relations after the Holocaust. Waiting for Godot Despite a critical tendency to recognize Beckett as an author whose work is nearly always responding to the Holocaust, there is very little engagement with how in fact this response is articulated in his texts. Adorno’s inspired remarks on Beckett in Negative Dialectics and in his essay ‘Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen’ (‘Towards an Understanding of Endgame’) are the principal exceptions here. In Negative Dialectics he writes, ‘Beckett has given us the only fitting reaction to the situation of the concentration camps – a situation he never calls by name, as if it were subject to an image ban. What is, he says, is like a concentration camp.’221 Similarly, in the essay on Endgame Adorno reflects that ‘The name of the disaster is only to be spoken silently’.222 Critchley encapsulates what is at stake in Adorno’s assessment of Beckett: What he means is that by refusing to name the Holocaust, that is, by deliberately abstaining from dredging meaning out of the suffering of victims in the manner of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and much of the Holocaust industry, Beckett gives us the only appropriate response to it.223 Critchley subsequently elaborates Adorno’s take on Beckett in terms which are significant for my thesis about his testamentary response to the Holocaust entailed by the dramatic structure of address in his playtexts. Critchley explains Adorno’s insight that Beckett’s oeuvre

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operates ‘not by raising its voice against society or protesting against the obvious injustice of the Holocaust, but rather by elevating social criticism to the level of form’.224 Whereas Weiss’s play is about the Holocaust and also about the relationship between the Holocaust and language, within a theologically-motivated framework, the extent to which Waiting for Godot is about the Holocaust at all is in its dramatization of the predicament of theological and linguistic relations after the Holocaust. The following consideration of Waiting for Godot interprets both the play’s theological outlook towards an absent but hypothetically present God and its concern with the possibility of ‘saying’ as complementary aspects of what I have formulated as its ‘testamentary’ remembrance of the Holocaust. William Hutchings writes that ‘Any understanding of what Waiting for Godot means must be predicated on an understanding of how it means’.225 As I discussed above in relation to Beckett’s remark about the different experiences of writing prose and drama, dramatic meaning is largely constituted by the act of saying, and so the possibilities and limitations of saying anything literally form the subject of his plays. To return again to Beckett’s pithy analysis of the relationship between form and content in Joyce’s writing which has frequently been applied to his own work: ‘His writing is not about something; it is that something itself’.226 Despite widespread critical acceptance of these insights, they have often resulted in studies focusing on what is said, unsaid or not said in Beckett’s texts, rather than on how acts of saying, unsaying or not saying take place. Such studies not only miss the point about Beckett’s literary form, but in their critical reduction of the saying to the said they also fail to take account of Levinas’s ethical distinction and thereby to carry out what Robert Eaglestone identifies as the critic’s responsibility of acting as ‘witness’ to the saying in the language of literature.227 Carla Locatelli considers the mutual implications of Beckett’s views of God and language, analysing how Beckett’s later prose texts challenge logocentrism by stressing ‘the “event-quality” of communication’, and thereby showing ‘that any subject can be constituted only as the perceiver-perceived of an interpreted world’.228 Locatelli’s discussion of how ‘Beckett’s works grow between a necessary saying and the liberating unsaying of what has necessarily been said’,229 clearly relies on Levinas’s distinction between ‘le dire et le dit’ in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, although Levinas is only scantly referenced in her work.230 In her 2001 essay, Locatelli’s

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neologism, ‘theo-less-ology’, refers to how questions about God in early Beckett texts evolve into questions about articulation in his later work. Quoting Levinas in his Ethics and Infinity, Locatelli contends, ‘Perhaps the early Beckett tried to eliminate God through a strategy of juvenile derision. However, when he found this impossible, he took the risk of “giving to what breaks with the categories of discourse the form of the said’’.’231 In what follows I will show how, even in Waiting for Godot, his first play, Beckett attests to the absence and hypothetical presence of God within speech-acts which relate to Levinas’s idea of the ethical encounter. The particular ways in which the theological relationship is desanctified suggest that the context for this encounter is always after the Holocaust. Waiting for Godot begins with a dialogue between two men, Estragon and Vladimir, who meet each other again after having been apart. Estragon’s opening statement, ‘Nothing to be done’ is both an expression of resignation at his failure to take off his boot and, as Vladimir’s response indicates, of a more profound defeatism. What Estragon says throughout this first exchange is meaningful – and frequently very funny – not only in his saying of it, but in Vladimir’s acts of saying back to him. Vladimir’s subsequent repetition of ‘Nothing to be done’ reinforces their shared sense of meaning. Theirs is a true dialogue of statement and response, question and answer. As Beckett’s parenthetical instructions for how the text is to be spoken indicate, their dialogue is variously marked by irritability, gloom and anger, and these emotions, as ways of saying which modify the meaning of what is said, do not preclude the mutual exchange. Estragon and Vladimir’s initial acts of saying seem far removed from Beckett’s own prescription for art to be ‘The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’.232 A metaphysical turn in their conversation is heralded by Vladimir’s observation in relation to the Gospel story that ‘One of the thieves was saved’. Vladimir leads this part of the conversation since Estragon is unable to remember the Gospel: he questions Estragon about what he can remember until his abbreviated account of the Christian crucifixion generates return questions from Estragon on the identity of ‘our Saviour’ and the nature of salvation.233 Vladimir, piqued that Estragon then seems bored by his account and does not reply, is induced to prompt Estragon to continue the conversation: ‘Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can’t you, once in a way?’ That Estragon obliges,

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answering with Beckett’s prescription of ‘exaggerated enthusiasm’, demonstrates his sense of the value of continued dialogue. One of the things that Waiting for Godot is about at this point, then, is the ongoing possibility of meaningful linguistic exchange even when one party has ‘no desire to express’. Vladimir wants the conversation about the Gospel story to continue whereas Estragon is bored and would rather not say anything, but he continues to say things to Vladimir out of a sense of ‘the obligation to express’ which is also the obligation of maintaining an ethical relation with the other. Vladimir and Estragon’s subsequent discussion of why they are in that place at that time – because, as Vladimir says, ‘We’re waiting for Godot’ – together with the conversation they have about hanging themselves, is often interpreted as a commentary on the pointlessness of human existence. Adorno describes how such futility in Beckett’s texts is always implicitly a consequence of the unspoken catastrophe of the Holocaust.234 While the content of some of the conversations in Waiting for Godot reflects a sense of futility, attention to the acts of saying offers an alternative perspective. Vladimir and Estragon are uncertain about the time and place of their appointed waiting but their uncertainty is articulated in continued dialogue with one another. They are prepared to consider killing themselves by hanging but, paradoxically, they do so in a conversation in which their very saying manifests their ethical attentiveness to each other.235 The possibility for continued conversation between individuals even in circumstances of radical doubt is, in this as in many other of Beckett’s plays, including the more one-sided and precarious conversation between Winnie and Willie in Happy Days, the reason for abiding hope in the midst of hopelessness. So while Vladimir and Estragon frequently talk about the hopelessness of their situation, their continued formal exchange illustrates that a face-to-face intersubjective encounter – in Levinas’s sense of the ultimate ethical relation – remains possible. Admittedly this particular strand of conversation terminates with Estragon’s request, ‘Let’s stop talking for a minute, do you mind?’, after which Estragon promptly falls asleep. The anticipation of the conversation’s end in an act of speech which Estragon also frames as a question to Vladimir which takes account of his interlocutor’s feelings is another source of hope. Conversations cannot proceed indefinitely, and when they do end they may do so in a way which is attentive to the ethical relation they have instantiated. The critical commonplace that Waiting for Godot is about the act of waiting should be elaborated to account for the way in which

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waiting in the play is always defined in terms of continued acts of saying, or the ongoing need to maintain a conversation. Robinson is close to this view in his suggestion that the endlessness of waiting is partly demonstrated ‘in the structure and dialogue of Godot itself ’.236 The possibilities for communication with other people are partly generated by the absence of the possibility of divine redemption in Beckett’s texts, which Adorno rightly associates with their response to the Holocaust. The unavailability of God after the Holocaust – which is one way in which the central action of waiting in Waiting for Godot might be interpreted – means that what was formerly a theological address is reconfigured as the potential for an address to other people. Critchley’s assertion that ‘philosophical modernity is the attempt to live with(in) the disappointment of religion’ offers an apt formulation of Vladimir and Estragon’s predicament.237 One of the many possible summaries of the play’s action contained in Vladimir and Estragon’s utterances is Estragon’s account early in the second act of how they should occupy themselves until their inevitable deaths: ‘In the meantime let us try and converse calmly, since we are incapable of keeping silent’.238 Whenever Vladimir and Estragon run out of things to say their conversation invariably resumes with a restatement of the need for further dialogue. In the second act Vladimir beseeches Estragon to ‘Say something! … Say anything at all!’ Shortly afterwards, Estragon suggests a way of carrying on talking: ‘let’s ask each other questions’. All their time is ‘spent blathering about nothing in particular’,239 so that waiting time in the play is entertainingly consumed by saying time. Their suffering existence, in the sense of enduring it or waiting for it to end, also suggests the aptness of the idea that Vladimir and Estragon are ‘doing time’, and the way in which they do it is in performative acts of saying. As with the psalmists and prophets of the Hebrew Bible, in Waiting for Godot the desanctified acts of saying are a possible means not only for the articulation of suffering, but also for its mitigation, in the possibility they represent for an intersubjective ethical relation. Whereas the Biblical acts of saying always occur in relation to God, after the Holocaust the existence of God as a presence to whom it is possible to relate in Beckett’s play is uncertain, as in Estragon’s question to Vladimir in Act Two, ‘Do you think God sees me?’ In God’s absence, even His hypothetical presence suffices to sustain the act of waiting, however, and, in the course of waiting, the act of ‘saying in relation to’ another person. The ethical dimensions of ‘saying in relation to’ – and the tragic-comic possibilities generated by these communicative

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(mis)understandings – are complicated by the arrival of the journeying master and servant, Pozzo and Lucky, and the way in which Pozzo speaks to Lucky. Pozzo’s failure to recognize Lucky as a fellow human being is indicated verbally by his insults, barked commands and his description of having journeyed ‘all alone’ although he was in fact with Lucky.240 Bradby suggests that Pozzo and Lucky’s relationship would have evoked the Nazi camps for Beckett’s post-war audiences.241 Pozzo’s initial addresses to Lucky are met by silence and the presence of these two new characters onstage serves to emphasize the reciprocity of Vladimir and Estragon’s acts of saying. Pozzo’s inverted sense of ethical relations with others as demonstrated in his manner of addressing Lucky, framed in terms of taking rather than giving, are also evident from his comment, ‘From the meanest creature one departs wiser, richer, more conscious of one’s blessings’. The one-sidedness of Pozzo’s speech-acts, in which self-fulfilment is predicated on the use and abuse of other people, means he cannot guarantee the attention of his addressees and is repeatedly obliged to mandate his listeners to listen: ‘Is everybody ready? Is everybody looking at me? Will you look at me, pig! I am ready. Is everybody listening? Is everybody ready? Hog! I don’t like talking in a vacuum.’242 The ethical value of Pozzo’s verbal communication is severely undermined by how he addresses people, since although the possibilities for the intersubjective ethical relations of speech ‘in a vacuum’ are necessarily limited, neither can those relations be established if the addressee’s attention is – albeit comically – forced. The first time Lucky speaks he is almost immediately interrupted and ordered to stop by Pozzo.243 When he resumes, his speech is remarkable as the longest and most perplexing act of saying in the playtext. Lucky’s monologue occurs in response to Pozzo’s suggestion that they divert themselves by having Lucky perform for them in some way. Having first danced, Lucky is then ordered to think, and his speech is an extended performance of thinking aloud. Although it is performed before Pozzo, Vladimir and Estragon, it is not necessarily addressed to them. His speech is a single unpunctuated utterance consisting of largely senseless gabble which is nonetheless tantalizingly referential. Critical commentaries on Lucky’s speech abound, although these are often focused on attempts to account for what is said or not said, with only passing consideration of how he is saying or not saying it. Insightful descriptions of Lucky’s mode of speaking include Frederick Busi’s account of Lucky’s verbal style as ‘a subcategory of aphasia – paraphrasia: he tends to say the same thing repeatedly in other words’.244 Lawrence Graver notes that Lucky’s ‘shattering interjection’

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‘reproduces in its very movement the essential dramatic pressure of everything in the play that has preceded it’.245 Lucky’s ‘think’ can be interpreted as a mangled version both of an act of Biblical testament, and of Greenberg’s ‘voluntary covenant’. Whereas the Old and New Testaments bear witness to God’s past and ongoing salvational intervention in human affairs, Lucky’s speech presents a highly ambivalent view of God, and is often delivered in an accelerated, mechanical style in stage performances. The speech begins with what, in a parody of academic discourse, is an apparently unequivocal statement of God’s existence, which is then complicated by the ensuing account of divine indifference to as well as unaccountable partiality towards humanity: ‘Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown’.246 The view of God which Lucky presents and the way in which he presents it encapsulate the concerns of post-Holocaust theology. God’s failure to intervene and prevent the sufferings of the Jews who were persecuted and killed during the Holocaust, in the context of the traditional Judaeo-Christian view of a ‘God who acts in history’, is the cause for fundamental questioning and revaluation of the divine–human relationship, like that entailed by Greenberg’s conception of the ‘voluntary covenant’. In Greenberg’s view of the only form of covenantal relationship which is possible after the Holocaust, the Jewish people themselves bear the sole responsibility for attesting to God’s existence since God’s inaction during the Holocaust means that He no longer has the authority to mandate covenantal obedience. Greenberg’s post-Holocaust testament is voluntary and is substantiated in human conduct towards others, and hence may be identified even in the actions of those with no religious affiliations. The speech given by Beckett’s Lucky, who is often characterized in terms of the Biblical ‘suffering servant’, is neither a straightforwardly Biblical testament nor, since it is involuntary in at least one sense of the word, a voluntary testament, but in what is said, unsaid and not said in the speech, as well as how Lucky says, unsays and does not say it, there is plenty to suggest it forms disrupted versions of each. In the outline of the Biblical testament given at the beginning of this chapter, I referred to the way in which the terms ‘covenant’ and ‘testament’ are often used interchangeably in the Christian Bible, in

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spite of the concern that ‘the latter word suggests a legacy from one who is gone, and the former an established and permanent relationship with one who is alive’.247 This concern about the possible emphases of meaning can be used productively in consideration of how Lucky’s speech relates to the Biblical testamentary model and the revised notion of the voluntary covenant. Lucky’s speech articulates a response to the Holocaust in its testamentary form, in both senses of speaking from the dead and yet with a living, covenantal voice. Apart from his first interrupted attempt to begin his speech ‘On the other hand with regard to –’, the long speech towards the end of the first act constitutes Lucky’s only verbal contribution to the play. In the time between his appearances in the first and second acts Lucky is inexplicably rendered dumb. So within the terms of the play, the hurtling, ‘choker’248 of a speech is Lucky’s last gasp, and possibly even his last will and testament. Nonetheless Lucky is alive as he delivers his speech and does not die during the play, so that it cannot be considered entirely as ‘a legacy from one who is gone’. For all the inhumanity with which he is treated by Pozzo, and periodically also by Vladimir and Estragon, Lucky’s voice as he delivers his speech remains ‘a living voice’ with all the attendant possibilities of establishing an ethical relation that such a voice entails. This contradictory sense of Lucky’s speech as a ‘living dead’ testament is reinforced by the interpretation of Pozzo and Lucky’s exploitative relationship in terms of the Nazi concentration camps in which the prevailing condition was that of suffering on the brink of death.249 The first part of Lucky’s speech remembers people whose unjustified sufferings take place in hellish fires whose flames reach into heaven: ‘those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm so calm’.250 This description evokes the victims of the Holocaust in terms of the arbitrariness of divine judgement, reminiscent of Weiss’s subsequent and largely futile attempts to impose a Dantean cosmic order upon Auschwitz. Words from this description recur, juxtaposed with the word ‘beard’ from the initial account of God, in the speech’s increasingly repetitive and disjointed closing section: ‘on on the beard the flames the tears the stones so blue so calm alas alas’. The list of the four objects ‘beard’, ‘flames’, ‘tears’ and ‘stones’ contributes to the register of despair which pervades this part of the speech, confirmed in the double ‘alas’. In this final part of the speech the earth is frequently referred to as an ‘abode of stones’

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suggesting gravestones as well as the Jewish memorial practice of placing small stones in memory of the dead. The unpunctuated stream of Lucky’s words mean that their emphasis is difficult to determine when they are read in a printed text, where each word is potentially of equal (in)significance. On the other hand, in dramatic performance in a way that is comparable with musical performance, the repetitive phrases and unfinished sentences generate their own stresses as they are spoken so that, predictably for Beckett, linguistic form suggests linguistic meaning. Lucky’s speech means most when it is witnessed in its spoken form, as a ‘living dead’ testament to the ‘dead voices’ of the victims of the Holocaust. The performative context of Lucky’s ‘saying’, cognizant of the limitations of the post-Holocaust testament, as well as the compelling reasons for not saying anything in Lucky’s circumstances, also comes closest to fulfilling Beckett’s sense of art as ‘The expression that there is nothing to express’. The fact that, against the odds, Lucky says anything at all, albeit a garbled monologic testament before an unresponsive God and human addressees who eventually conspire to silence him, maintains, however precariously, the possibility of an intersubjectively ethical relation after the Holocaust. The testamentary nature of this dramatic possibility of responding to the Holocaust is emphasized by the fact that this is all that Lucky says in the play: that these are the final words spoken by a yet living voice. Conclusion Weiss and Beckett did in fact meet on one occasion. Weiss describes their encounter in an article made up of published extracts from his journal from the years 1960 and 1962. At their meeting Weiss formulated his impressions of Beckett’s work in terms which are significant for my conception of testamentary drama: ‘I said that I could almost detect a sense of optimism in his writing, and that this quality was perhaps necessary in order to be able to portray the final stages of humiliation. Each of his books seemed to contain the very last thing that it was possible to say, and yet he then succeeded in breaking new ground again.’251 This sense of testifying at the edge of what it is possible to articulate is relevant to both Beckett’s and Weiss’s literary responses to the Holocaust. As Felman observes, the very necessity of bearing witness to events such as the Holocaust ‘is itself somehow a philosophical and ethical correlative of a situation with no cure, and of a radical human condition of exposure and

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vulnerability’.252 Weiss identifies the testimonial imperative which prevails in Beckett’s work despite its continual danger of being thwarted. It is the same imperative that Weiss observes among the defendants during his attendance of sessions of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial and records in his notebooks at the time, and which informs his writing of Die Ermittlung. Weiss goes on to describe Beckett’s concern ‘that perhaps one day there would be nothing more than an ultimate silence’.253 Again, this corresponds to Weiss’s own subsequent anxieties about the difficulty of formulating an adequate linguistic response to the Holocaust, recorded in his notebooks from 1964.254 Alvin Rosenfeld interprets the quotation from Beckett’s ‘Three Dialogues with George Duthuit’, cited at the beginning of this chapter, as the description par excellence of the challenges for literature after the Holocaust in resisting the temptation of ‘ultimate silence’. Rosenfeld’s quotation contains a telling ellipsis. The full Beckett text reads: ‘The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’.255 Rosenfeld presumably omits the four words ‘no desire to express’ because of their potential to detract from his otherwise compelling case of an ‘ethical imperative’ to which the author of Holocaust literature is responding.256 My analysis of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has shown how the act of saying after the Holocaust is indeed fraught, for reasons that are theologically and linguistically interconnected. Rosenfeld’s ‘ethical imperative’ is fulfilled in the way in which saying against the odds is constitutive of an ethical relation of responsibility towards the other. Langer describes how for survivors of the Holocaust ‘[t]he anxiety of futility’ mitigates against the desire to bear witness: ‘From the point of view of the witness, the urge to tell meets resistance from the certainty that one’s audience will not understand’.257 That witnessing takes place even when there is ‘no desire to express’ demonstrates the voluntary nature of the relations – the theological and linguistic testaments – that are contracted after the Holocaust. As the Biblical prophets’ condemnation of rituals of sacrifice in favour of an inward demonstration of faith which I discussed in Chapter One suggested, a voluntary ethics of witness against the odds is surely even more ethically meaningful than one that is involuntarily mandated. In his book about the operation of memory in Holocaust survivors’ testimonies, Langer discusses some of the ways in which

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literary considerations detract from their act of testimony and what it seeks to communicate. Referring to the episode in Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz in which Levi recites from Dante’s Inferno, Langer writes ‘When we return from Dante’s world to Auschwitz, we learn that the babel of tongues is more concerned with eating than with speaking.’258 The literal and literary acts of testimony after the Holocaust – and the commentaries upon them – share the luxury of being concerned with acts of saying rather than eating. The luxury of a sustained engagement with Dante’s world, such as that pursued by both Weiss and Beckett, is also available again. But Weiss’s and Beckett’s play-texts enact the understanding that any concern with saying, or with Dante and the Judaeo-Christian theological worldview that he espouses, must henceforth be cognizant of the Holocaust, as well of its own inevitable failure adequately to be cognizant of the Holocaust. The acts of testamentary remembrance in Weiss’s and Beckett’s dramas, evoking the structures of address entailed by both oral survivor testimonies and Biblical testaments, themselves enact what Langer describes in relation to survivor testimonies, whereby ‘The search for value contends with the absence of value’.259 Laub similarly describes how the survivor ‘testifies to an absence’.260 This is another version of the irreconcilable and yet interdependent interrelation between Levinas’s ‘le dire et le dit’, where the act of saying constitutes the search for value which is always undermined by and yet could not exist without what is said, signifying the absence of value. As acts of ‘saying in relation to’, the dramatic testamentary acts demonstrate the inter-related residual possibilities of linguistic and theological expression, although much of what is said – including the torturous sufferings recounted by the witnesses and the Christian platitudes of the defendants in Die Ermittlung, and the quasi-theological ‘quaquaquaqua’ of Lucky’s speech in Waiting for Godot – attests to the futility of contracting linguistic or theological relations in any case. To return to Milton Teichman, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Weiss’s and Beckett’s drama simultaneously ‘assumes the worthwhileness of human experience’, where that experience is the act of saying to another, and the ‘meaningless and absurd’ nature of what can be said. Hence, like the survivor testimonies themselves, the play-texts of Weiss and Beckett preserve the contradictory senses of cultural inheritance and desolation which George Steiner asks of linguistic communication after the Holocaust. Beckett and Weiss reinterpret the testamentary act as a post-Holocaust inheritance of linguistic and theological desolation.

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NOTES 1. M. Teichman, ‘Literature of Agony and Triumph: An Encounter with the Holocaust’, College English, 37, no.6 (February 1976), pp.613–18, see p.618. 2. A.H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington, IN and London: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp.154–9. 3. Ibid., pp.7–8. 4. C. Gore, H.L. Goudge and A. Guillame (eds), A New Commentary on Holy Scripture (London: SPCK, 1951), p.11. 5. Ibid., p.2. 6. S. Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 2006), p.58. 7. See Gore, A New Commentary on Holy Scripture, p.3. 8. See Rosenfeld, A Double Dying, p.15. 9. P. Levi, If This Is A Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1987), pp.71–2. 10. See http://www.library.yale.edu/testimonies/ 11. S. Felman and D. Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge, 1992), p.72. 12. D.G. Roskies, ‘The Holocaust According to the Literary Critics’, Prooftexts, 1, no.2 (May 1981), pp.209–16. 13. Ibid., p.215. 14. B.L. Sherwin, ‘Elie Wiesel and Jewish Theology’, Judaism, 18, no.1 (Winter 1969), pp.39–52, see p.40. 15. L.L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1991), p.37. 16. G.H. Hartman, The Longest Shadow (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp.20–3. 17. Ibid., p.11. 18. Ibid., p.4. 19. Ibid., pp.28–9. 20. Ibid., pp.23, 79. 21. See Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p.52. 22. See Hartman, The Longest Shadow, p.11. 23. For a comprehensive discussion of the literary characteristics of oral and written survivor testimony, see L.L. Langer, Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1982). 24. See Hartman, The Longest Shadow, p.51. 25. P. Davies, The Real Ideal: Beckett’s Fiction and Imagination (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994), pp.22–3. 26. Ibid., p.53. 27. See Felman and Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing, p.xiv. 28. See Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p.2. 29. H. Zirker, Die kultische Vergegenwärtigung der Vergangenheit in den Psalmen (Bonn: Peter Hanstein, 1964), p.96. 30. I. Greenberg, ‘Voluntary Covenant’, in S.L. Jacobs (ed.), Contemporary Jewish Responses to the Shoah (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993), pp.70–105, see pp.82–90. 31. Ibid., p.92. 32. Ibid., pp.94–5.

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33. S.L. Jacobs, (ed.), Contemporary Jewish Responses to the Shoah (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993), p.11. 34. See Greenberg, ‘Voluntary Covenant’, p.96. 35. Ibid., p.98. 36. Ibid., p.98; see also I. Greenberg, ‘Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust’, in E.N. Dorff and L.E. Newman (eds), Contemporary Jewish Theology: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.396–416, see pp.408–9. 37. See Greenberg, ‘Voluntary Covenant’, p.104. 38. A.L. Berger, ‘The Holocaust, Second-Generation Witness, and the Voluntary Covenant in American Judaism’, Religion and American Culture, 5, no.1 (Winter 1995), pp.23–47. 39. See Greenberg, ‘Voluntary Covenant’, p.104; and Greenberg, ‘Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire’, p.413. 40. See Levinas, Proper Names, pp.3–4. 41. Ibid., p.4. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., p.6. 44. See Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p.38. 45. See Felman and Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing, pp.57–9. 46. Ibid., p.xiii. 47. G.H. Hartman, The Fateful Question of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp.102–3. 48. Ibid., p.121. 49. See Hartman, The Longest Shadow, p.24. 50. Ibid., p.52. 51. See Felman and Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing, p.xvii. 52. Ibid., p.41. 53. J.R. Ballengee, ‘Witnessing Video Testimony: An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14, no.1 (Spring 2001), pp.217–32, see pp.219–20. 54. Sometimes survivor testimony is recorded jointly, as in the testimonies of Max and Lorna B. and Bessie and Jacob K. to which Langer refers in Holocaust Testimonies, pp.ix–xi, 49–50, 52–3. 55. See Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p.60. 56. See Felman and Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing, p.41. 57. See Ballengee, ‘An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman’, p.220. 58. J. Zipes, ‘Beckett in Germany / Germany in Beckett’, New German Critique, 26 (Spring-Summer 1982), pp.151–8, see pp.154–5. 59. Ibid., p.152. 60. D. Bair, Samuel Beckett (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1978), p.54. 61. Ibid., p.244. 62. Ibid., p.308. 63. J. Knowlson and E. Knowlson (eds), Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p.86. 64. See Zipes, ‘Beckett in Germany’, p.158. 65. H. Falkenstein, Peter Weiss (Berlin: Morgenbuch Verlag, 1996), p.22.

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66. P. Weiss, Notizbücher 1960–1971 I. Band (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), p.306. 67. M. Haiduk, Der Dramatiker Peter Weiss (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1977), p.15. 68. P. Weiss, Die Besiegten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), p.11. 69. Ibid., p.28. 70. See Weiss, Die Besiegten, p.36. 71. Ibid., p.36. 72. See Weiss, Notizbücher 1960–1971, p.345. 73. R. Cohen, Understanding Peter Weiss (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), p.87. 74. See Weiss, Die Besiegten, p.147. 75. See Weiss, Notizbücher 1960–1971, p.230. 76. Ibid., pp.309, 315. 77. W. Wager (ed.), The Playwrights Speak (New York: Delacorte Press, 1967), p.205. 78. See Weiss, Notizbücher 1960–1971, p.293. 79. P. Weiss, Peter Weiss im Gespräch, R. Gerlach and M. Richter (eds) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), p.50. 80. P. Weiss, Aufsätze Journale Arbeitspunkte: Schriften zu Kunst und Literatur (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1979), p.88. 81. Ibid., p.91. 82. Ibid., p.95. 83. Ibid., p.96. 84. See Bair, Samuel Beckett, p.18. 85. Ibid., p.267. 86. In her article ‘Beckett and the Apophatic in Selected Shorter Texts’, which itself appears within a volume of collected articles on Beckett and religion, Birgitta Johansson gives an overview of book-length studies of Beckett’s work and God/religion and negative theology, see M. Buning, M. Engelberts and O. Kosters (eds), Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 9: Beckett and Religion, Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), pp.55– 66. Carla Locatelli’s article ‘“Theo-Less-Ology”: God Talk and Unwording in Beckett’ references further recent studies, see A. Moorjani and C. Veit (eds), Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 11: Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001), pp.341–50, see endnotes 1, 2 and 4, p.348. 87. M. Bryden and L. Butler, ‘Introduction to “Beckett and Religion”’, in M. Buning, M. Engelberts and O. Kosters (eds), Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 9: Beckett and Religion, Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), pp.13–15, see p.13. 88. See Bair, Samuel Beckett, pp.18–19. 89. L. St J. Butler, ‘A Mythology with which I am Perfectly Familiar: Samuel Beckett and the Absence of God’, in R. Welch (ed.), Irish Writers and Religion (Savage, MD: Barnes & Noble Books, 1992), pp.169–84, see p.169. 90. B. Johansson, ‘Beckett and the Apophatic in Selected Shorter Texts’, pp.55–66, see p.55. 91. M. Bryden, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (London: Macmillan Press, 1998), p.2.

214 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

110. 111.

112.

113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

Forgetting to Remember Ibid., p.6. S. Beckett, Disjecta (London: John Calder, 1983), p.68. See Bryden, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God, p.10. See Beckett, Disjecta, p.69. See Felman and Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing, p.xvii. See Beckett, Disjecta, p.27. See Bryden, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God, p.112. Ibid., p.118. S. Beckett, Mercier and Camier (London: Picador, 1988), p.26. See Bryden, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God, p.162. S. Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p.99. See Johansson, ‘Beckett and the Apophatic in Selected Shorter Texts’, p.61. See Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing, p.135. See Felman and Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing, p80, p.3. Ibid., p.81. J. Jacobsen and W.R. Mueller, The Testament of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), p.110. Ibid., p.27. See Bryden, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God, p.2, p.22; Johansson, ‘Beckett and the Apophatic in Selected Shorter Texts’, p.60 and Locatelli, ‘“Theo-LessOlogy”’, p.342. See Jacobsen and Mueller, The Testament of Samuel Beckett, pp.167–8. C. Duckworth, ‘Beckett and the Missing Sharer’, in M. Buning, M. Engelberts and O. Kosters (eds), Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 9: Beckett and Religion, Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), pp.133– 44, see p.139. R.C. Lamont, ‘Fast-Forward: Lucky’s Pnigos’, in A. Moorjani and C. Veit (eds), Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 11: Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001), pp.132–9, see p.135. W. Hutchings, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: A Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), pp.34–5. See Locatelli, ‘“Theo-Less-Ology”’, p.345. See Weiss, Peter Weiss im Gespräch, p.127. See Weiss, Notizbücher 1960–1971, p.254. P. Weiss, Notizbücher 1971–1980 I. Band (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), p.58. See Wager, The Playwrights Speak, p.190. See Weiss, Notizbücher 1960–1971, p.229. Ibid., p.247. See Weiss, Notizbücher 1971–1980, pp.118, 374. See Weiss, Die Besiegten, p.36. Ibid., p.42. See Weiss, Notizbücher 1960–1971, p.157. O. Berwald, An Introduction to the Works of Peter Weiss (New York: Camden House, 2003), p.102. See Weiss, Aufsätze Journale Arbeitspunkte, p.102. Ibid., p.103.

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128. See Cohen, Understanding Peter Weiss, p.86 and M. Lee, Das Engagement für die Geschichte und die Wirklichkeit in den Dokumentarstücken von Peter Weiss (Göttingen: Cuvillier Verlag, 2004), p.209. 129. See Weiss, Aufsätze Journale Arbeitspunkte, p.104. 130. Ibid., p.106. 131. See Haiduk, Der Dramatiker Peter Weiss, p.15. 132. See Weiss, Notizbücher 1960–1971, p.55. 133. See Weiss, Peter Weiss im Gespräch, p.57. 134. Ibid., p.66. 135. Ibid., p.114. 136. Ibid., p.51. 137. Ibid., p.51. 138. Ibid., p.57. 139. See Ballengee, ‘An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman’, p.219. 140. See Weiss, Peter Weiss im Gespräch, p.208. 141. See Beckett, Disjecta, p.27. 142. T.W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), p.15. 143. T.W. Adorno, ‘Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen’, in Noten zur Literatur II (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961), pp.188–236, see pp.188–90. 144. See Felman and Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing, pp.59–63. 145. Ibid., p.85. 146. See Weiss, Notizbücher 1960–1971, p.211, my emphasis. 147. See Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p.58. 148. M. Gussow, Conversations With and About Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1996), p.32. 149. J.L. Kundert-Gibbs, No-Thing Is Left To Tell: Zen/Chaos Theory in the Dramatic Art of Samuel Beckett (London: Associated University Presses, 1999), p.17. 150. See Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p.58. 151. S. Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing (London: Routledge, 2004), p.180. 152. See Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p.23. 153. Ibid., p.113. 154. See Weiss, Notizbücher 1960–1971, p.36. 155. Ibid., p.37. 156. See Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p.86. 157. See Weiss, Peter Weiss im Gespräch, p.112. 158. Ibid., pp.151–2. 159. See Beckett, Disjecta, p.106. 160. See Adorno, ‘Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen’, p.224. 161. See Haiduk, Der Dramatiker Peter Weiss, p.125. 162. See Weiss, Aufsätze Journale Arbeitspunkte, p.152. 163. Ibid., p.152. 164. Ibid., p.156. 165. See Haiduk, Der Dramatiker Peter Weiss, p.126. 166. See Weiss, Aufsätze Journale Arbeitspunkte, p.156. 167. Ibid., p.158. 168. See Weiss, Peter Weiss im Gespräch, p.125. 169. See Weiss, Aufsätze Journale Arbeitspunkte, p.157. 170. See Weiss, Notizbücher 1960–1971, p.215.

216 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188.

189. 190. 191. 192.

193. 194.

195. 196. 197. 198. 199.

200. 201. 202. 203. 204. 205. 206. 207. 208.

Forgetting to Remember See Weiss, Aufsätze Journale Arbeitspunkte, p.111. See Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p.113. See Weiss, Aufsätze Journale Arbeitspunkte, p.112. S. Beckett, The Unnamable (London: Calder & Boyars, 1975), p.41. See Weiss, Peter Weiss im Gespräch, pp.73–4. Ibid., p.74. See Felman and Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing, pp.xiv, 62. See Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p.40. Ibid., p.41. See Weiss, Peter Weiss im Gespräch, p.83. Ibid., pp.99–100. See Rosenfeld, A Double Dying, p.154. Ibid., p.157. Ibid., p.156. Ibid., p.159. See Gore, A New Commentary on Holy Scripture, p.2. Ibid., p.11. W.G. Sebald, ‘The Remorse of the Heart – On Memory and Cruelty in the Work of Peter Weiss’, in On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2003), pp.173–95, see p.176. Ibid., p.177. Ibid., p.184. Ibid., p.176. K.L. Berghahn, ‘“Our Auschwitz”: Peter Weiss’s The Investigation Thirty Years Later’, in J. Herman and M. Silberman (eds), Rethinking Peter Weiss (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), pp.93–118, see p.101. Ibid., pp.108–12. K.L. Berghahn, ‘Operative Ästhetik: Zur Theorie der dokumentarischen Literatur’, in P.M. Lützeler and E. Schwarz (eds), Deutsche Literatur in der Bundesrepublik seit 1965 (Königstein: Athenäum, 1980), pp.270–81, see p.274. See Berghahn, ‘“Our Auschwitz”’, p.107. See Cohen, Understanding Peter Weiss, pp.84–5. See Hartman, The Longest Shadow, p.40. See Felman and Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing, p.78. See, for example, Berghahn, ‘“Our Auschwitz”’, p.115; W. Jens, ‘Die Ermittlung in West Berlin’, in Peter Weiss, Die Ermittlung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), pp.205–9, see p.205; Rosenfeld, A Double Dying, pp.156–7. P. Weiss, Die Ermittlung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), p.25. See Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p.49. C. Bigsby, Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp.167–8. See Weiss, Die Ermittlung, p.91. See Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p.83. R. Ellis, Peter Weiss in Exile: A Critical Study of His Works (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987), p.48. See Cohen, Understanding Peter Weiss, p.95. See Berghahn, ‘“Our Auschwitz”’, p.101. See Weiss, Die Ermittlung, p.113.

Drama as Testament: Peter Weiss and Samuel Beckett 209. 210. 211. 212. 213. 214. 215. 216. 217. 218. 219. 220. 221. 222. 223. 224. 225. 226. 227. 228. 229. 230. 231. 232. 233. 234. 235. 236. 237. 238. 239. 240. 241. 242. 243. 244. 245. 246.

217

Ibid., p.119. Ibid., pp.195–6. Ibid., p.28. Ibid., pp.28–9. Ibid., p.46. Ibid. Ibid., p.71. Ibid., p.142. G. Steiner, Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1967), p.ix. See Weiss, Die Ermittlung, pp.106–7. See Steiner, Language and Silence, p.x. O.F. Best, Peter Weiss, trans. U. Molinaro (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1976), pp.87–8. T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), p.380. T.W. Adorno, ‘Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen’, in Noten zur Literatur II (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961), pp.188–236, see p.199. See Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing, pp.xxii–iii. Ibid., p.26. W. Hutchings, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: A Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), p.23. See Beckett, Disjecta, p.27. R. Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p.170. C. Locatelli, Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works After the Nobel Prize (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), p.x. Ibid., p.16. Ibid., pp.15, 230, 231. See Locatelli, ‘“Theo-Less-Ology”’, p.347. See Beckett, Disjecta, p.139. See Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, pp.13–14. See Adorno, ‘Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen’, p.199. See Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, pp.18–19. M. Robinson, The Long Sonata of the Dead: A Study of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1969), p.247. See Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing, p.158. See Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p.58. Ibid., p.61. Ibid., p.25. D. Bradby, Beckett, Waiting for Godot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.62. See Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, pp.30–1; see also pp.36, 37. Ibid., p.41. F. Busi, The Transformations of Godot (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1980), p.57. L. Graver, Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.48, 46. See Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p.42.

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247. 248. 249. 250. 251. 252. 253. 254. 255. 256. 257. 258. 259. 260.

See Gore, A New Commentary on Holy Scripture, p.11. See Lamont, ‘Fast-Forward: Lucky’s Pnigos’, p.133. See Bradby, Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p.62. See Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p.42. See Weiss, Aufsätze Journale Arbeitspunkte, p.64. See Felman and Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing, p.5. See Weiss, Aufsätze Journale Arbeitspunkte, p.64. See Weiss, Notizbücher 1960–1971, pp.215, 222. See Beckett, Disjecta, p.139. See Rosenfeld, A Double Dying, p.7. See Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p.xiii. Ibid., p.46. Ibid., p.68. See Felman and Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing, p.57.

Conclusion

Remembrance as Disconsolation

I

n this study I have argued that as part of their response to the Holocaust, certain literary texts reinterpret Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance in ways which are related to the structures of address entailed by their particular literary genres. Lawrence Langer identifies a danger in writing about the Holocaust, whereby ‘our need to reduce chaos to at least an intellectual order sometimes drives us to find explanations that are more convenient than accurate’.1 For Langer, the oral testimony of Holocaust survivors is especially proficient in avoiding this danger in its capacity and willingness ‘to leave itself unreconciled’. Other ways of avoiding the pitfall that Langer identifies include Adorno’s increasingly fragmentary style in Negative Dialectics, Levinas’s ‘difficult’ or ‘abstract’ writing style in Otherwise Than Being,2 and Eaglestone’s prescription for a Levinassian post-Holocaust literary criticism of ‘interruption’. While this book is undoubtedly culpable of Langer’s charge, the claims I make for the literary texts demonstrate how they largely avoid the temptation to ‘find explanations’ for the Holocaust and for the remembrance of it in their preservation of a condition of disconsolation in their textual address. The texts distance themselves from traditional Judaeo-Christian expectations of finding reconciliation through remembrance and enact remembrance of the Holocaust as what Geoffrey Hill terms ‘a sad / and angry consolation’.3 Dori Laub characterizes the particular experience of the Holocaust as one in which the possibility of address is annihilated. During the Holocaust, the very imagination of the Other was no longer possible. There was no longer an other to which one could say ‘Thou’ in the hope of being heard, of being recognized as a subject, of being answered. The historical reality of the Holocaust became, thus, a reality

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which extinguished philosophically the very possibility of address, the possibility of appealing, or of turning to, another. But when one cannot turn to a ‘you’ one cannot say ‘thou’ even to oneself. The Holocaust created in this way a world in which one could not bear witness to oneself.4 Laub elaborates upon the devastating ongoing consequences of this experience for those who survived the Holocaust. The literary texts I have examined seek, in various ways, both to explore this sense of victimhood during and after the Holocaust as the impossibility of conceiving of an addressee who can be spoken to, and to restore a linguistic possibility of address. Language itself has to be made to testify to these irreconcilable dimensions of experience. The texts enact the seemingly contradictory process of bearing witness to a situation in which there is no possibility or prospect of witnessing. I have argued that the manner in which the texts establish a mode of address, in their reinterpretation of the structures of address of redundant JudaeoChristian forms of remembrance, is derived from their very commitment to demonstrating the failure of address both during the Holocaust and in the theological and linguistic contexts which exist after it. Celan formulates the challenges for language after the Holocaust in his 1958 Bremen speech, ‘language must now pass through its own unanswerabilities, pass through terrible silence, pass through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech’.5 In order for it to be made to speak for, and about, the condition of having survived the Holocaust, we need to recognize how both language, and the absence of language manifested in the failure of witnessing during the Holocaust, contributed to bringing about people’s suffering and death. The authors whose texts I consider seek – in their various languages – to make language do what Celan describes, in order that the readers of their texts may experience the disconsolate awareness that Langer attributes to Holocaust survivors, that ‘remembering is invariably associated simultaneously with survival and loss’.6 Langer observes that ‘in their videotaped testimonies witnesses pay equal homage to what they have “died through,” or what has died in and through them, and what they have lived through’.7 In remembering and testifying to their survival, survivors also remember their proximity to death and the actual deaths of those who did not survive, as well as the ways in which these encounters with death have infected their subsequent lives, which often involve practical difficulties with the daily requirements of addressing others.

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The Christian theologian David Tracy describes how ‘Christianity, a religion grounded in witness and remembrance, needs to rethink both of these after the Shoah.’8 For Tracy, the minimal requirement of post-Holocaust Christianity is ‘that Christian hermeneutics must be one that cannot forget the Shoah and therefore can no longer remember anything – even the central Christian confession, even the gospel as confessing narrative, even the grounding passion narrative – in the same way, ever again’.9 That is to say that all the Christian forms of remembrance, including those considered in this book – confession, anamnesis and testament – must be rethought after the Holocaust in order to take account of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust and Christian complicity in that suffering. I have argued that the linguistic responsibility after the Holocaust to bear witness to the situation in which witnessing was impossible is, in the texts I examine, connected with an awareness of the post-Holocaust Christian responsibility to remember Jewish suffering. This connection is apparent in the ways in which these texts reinterpret the structures of address of JudaeoChristian forms of remembrance as inadequate modes of remembering the Holocaust. As Tracy observes, ‘The Shoah exposes the need for a radical suspicion directed towards every component of our culture: humanist, Enlightenment, Christian.’10 One of the ways in which the texts I consider manifest such cultural suspicion is in their questioning of traditional forms of Judaeo-Christian remembrance. While these forms of remembrance have historically offered models for articulating traumatic and difficult memories – of personal sin and transgression in confession, of Christ’s death in Eucharistic anamnesis, and of devastation and loss from the destruction of the temple onwards in the Biblical testament – in view of Christian complicity in the Holocaust and the unprecedented aspect of loss demonstrated by Laub’s characterization of the Holocaust as a collapse of witnessing, they cannot fulfil the task of remembering this latest and most catastrophic episode of Jewish suffering. The memorial imperative in relation to the Holocaust is founded on the sense of a belated responsibility to the victims and the related duty of ensuring – via ways of behaving which include remembrance as well as an awareness of the inevitable inadequacy of remembrance as a response to the Holocaust – that such events do not happen again. To this end the literary texts do not simply repeat versions of Judaeo-Christian remembrance, they challenge and subvert those forms. The principle challenge is in the texts’ theological stances. Whereas Judaeo-Christian Biblical and liturgical remembrance consistently stands in relation to the conception of a God who

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intervenes in human history, the post-Holocaust God is rarely understood in the same terms. I have considered a number of conceptions of the post-Holocaust theological relation in current Jewish and Christian scholarship which find parallel expression in the literary texts. I consider the different ways in which the literary texts desanctify and distort the religious forms of remembrance, and call into question the very notion of a memorial imperative, even while they retain an intertextual connection to the respective forms of address that those forms of remembrance entail. Instead of accepting the redemptive possibilities of remembrance in the Judaeo-Christian context, these texts foreground the unavailability of redemption after the Holocaust: remembrance is no longer to be regarded as a source of consolation, but rather of disconsolation, and it is to this end – the refusal of consolation – that we should continue to remember. After the Holocaust, there is a widely perceived need to find a form of remembrance which will meet the unprecedented memorial demands of remembering an event which Wiesel has described as a ‘war against memory’,11 by bringing together hitherto disparate memorial discourses. Various ways of responding to this requirement have been suggested, including Friedlander and Greenberg’s call for the formation of a secular literary liturgy, and Hartman’s focus on survivors’ oral testimonies. Literary forms of remembrance after the Holocaust bear witness to the disaster and to the difficulties attendant upon the act of witnessing during and after the disaster. The texts I have considered in all the literary genres share a concern with establishing the linguistic conditions within which it is possible to remember the Holocaust, and they make these concerns explicit with reference to what writing in their respective genres involves. So one aspect of the literary response to the Holocaust involves a concern about the linguistic conditions of possibility for acts of saying, by the ‘I’ of the literary voice in relation to the various senses of ‘you’ entailed by its addressees, which constitute the intertextual forms of address. The literary texts engage with what Metz, after Benjamin, terms ‘dangerous memory’. They investigate the threatening implications of bearing witness to the Holocaust for both the text’s speaker(s) and addressee(s) and the endangered nature of remembrance itself after the Holocaust. The residual connection maintained by the texts to the structures of address involved in Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance, however, constitutes a lingering possibility for intersubjective relationships – a way of ‘saying in relation to’. Levinas’s conception of ethics after the Holocaust in terms of a face-to-face

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relation of speaking to the other is itself a reinterpretation of the relationship between man and God proposed in Descartes’ Third Meditation. Levinas’s positing of the act of address as the primary location of the ethical encounter helps to show how the literary acts of remembrance generate intertextual possibilities for subjective orientation. For Levinas, ‘It is the Saying that always opens up a passage from the Same to the Other, where there is as yet nothing in common.’12 The statements made by the authors whose texts I consider about the literary responsibilities of responding to the Holocaust and the implications of these for their various forms of textual address represent versions of Levinas’s insight. The distinctions I make between literary genres based on claims about their differing structures of address can only ever be relative ones, just as the distinctions between the Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance and their modes of address are not absolute. The boundaries between literary forms are not clearly defined and, even within individual texts, are always shifting. The forms of confession, anamnesis and testament are conceptually inter-related, as well as overlapping in liturgical practice. My contention in Chapter Two, for example, that Celan and Hill’s poetic texts operate in terms of a oneto-one confessional address, while grounded in their own poetological statements, is challenged in my discussion of Celan’s ‘Tenebrae’ in which the poetic address involves multiple speakers, as indicated by the use of the first person plural pronoun wir (we). Hill’s preoccupation with ‘literature as a civic utterance’13 clearly implies more numerous addressees than Celan’s individual ‘addressable you’ whom I also implicitly take to be Hill’s addressee in Chapter Two. While there are numerous examples of communal forms of confession in Jewish and Christian worship involving structures of address other than the one-to-one situation of the Roman Catholic confessional booth which might productively be discussed here, including the prayers of confession uttered during the Tenebrae service relevant to the specific poetic context of Celan and Hill’s ‘Tenebrae’ poems, I am not suggesting that all Celan and Hill’s poetry is confessional, or even that all of their poetry responding to the Holocaust should be regarded only in this way. Confession remains a valuable approach for understanding how remembrance of the Holocaust is articulated in their poetry, however, because of the connections it suggests between their respective poetological writings and the poetic texts themselves, as well as its elucidation of the nature of Celan’s influence on Hill’s work. The model of confession is also worthwhile precisely by virtue

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of its imperfect application to Celan and Hill’s poetry, since, as I have argued, their poetry does not simply repeat religious confessional practice in relation to the Holocaust, but is concerned to demonstrate both the undesirability and inadequacy of doing so. Just as confession is not the only way of approaching Hill and Celan’s Holocaust poetry, nor should it be confined to a consideration of the poetic literary response to the Holocaust. The guilt which Celan and Hill articulate in relation to their experiences of the Holocaust – or the lack of them – which is part of the motivation for understanding their texts as confessional, is shared in various forms by all the authors whose texts I discuss here. Furthermore, while the one-to-one address which I have argued is central to an understanding of the poetic confessional address is a feature of some poetry, this does not mean that such an address is precluded in other literary genres. In Chapter Three I considered the remembrance of the Holocaust in the novelistic prose writing of Grass and Kertész in terms of its correspondence with Eucharistic anamnesis. Kertész’s approach to novelistic prose is based upon his historical conception of writing as a way of maintaining a dialogue with God which now, in God’s absence, becomes the sustaining of a dialogue with other people. He advocates living as if God were watching. Bakhtin’s theory of the signature novelistic style as ‘heteroglossia’ illuminates the sense of a communal address in novelistic prose. But in the prose texts I discussed there are grounds for contesting my assertions about the structure of memorial address and, for instance, discussing them in relation to confession. I have suggested elsewhere how the confessional model might be a way of understanding some of Grass’s prose.14 As I maintain in Chapter Three, and as others have also suggested, Oskar Matzerath’s narrative in Die Blechtrommel reads like an extended act of confession. It involves various episodes which take place in the Roman Catholic confessional booth, and admits to a plethora of sins of both omission and commission. In addition to these thematic connections with the sacrament of penance, a case could be made for a confessional structure of address in Grass’s and Kertész’s prose texts. While I point to evidence in their theoretical and literary texts for a communal address, involving multiple addressees and sometimes also multiple speakers, prose writing of itself, and Grass’s and Kertész’s novelistic prose responding to the Holocaust in particular, does not necessarily entail such an address. Even the classification of Grass and Kertész’s novelistic writing as prose is open to debate: various passages from both Grass’s Die Blechtrommel and Kertész’s Kaddish establish

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connections with the poetic genre by virtue of their rhythmic, incantatory qualities. If the generic distinctions drawn in this study and the correspondences with Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance which I have derived from these are so contingent, what is the value of making such distinctions in the first place? The distinctions made here which determine the organization of chapters, while permeable, are not arbitrary. Even though they are open to numerous challenges, the literary classifications are justified by the authors’ own genre-specific reflections on the process of writing. There is consequently much to be gained by considering, say, the prose texts of Grass and Kertész in relation to one another, in conjunction with these authors’ statements on writing in prose, since Grass’s views on writing novelistic prose after the Holocaust specifically illuminate those of Kertész, and vice versa, although this does not mean it is not productive to compare texts of different genres. The forms of confession, anamnesis and testament are also flexible and do not correspond absolutely to the different literary genres, but nevertheless advance our understanding of the ways in which remembrance of the Holocaust is enacted in the various texts. They do this in ways which are specific to the relations between the structures of address in the religious and literary forms. Furthermore, the instability of the religious forms of remembrance is exploited by the literary texts in their reconfiguration of those forms as part of their development of the condition of disconsolation as necessary – and necessarily insufficient – to the remembrance of the Holocaust. The dramatic status of Weiss and Beckett’s play-texts perhaps calls for less qualification than the classification of the texts within other literary genres. My understanding of their drama as testamentary in Chapter Four emphasizes the ‘living voice’ which does the saying rather than the content of what is said. Even though I explain this emphasis in terms of Levinas’s sense of an ethical possibility of interrelationship in the act of saying, and in the context of the discussion of Holocaust survivors’ oral testimonies by Hartman, Langer, Laub and others where the act of witnessing is perceived as more significant than what is witnessed, my argument might still seem to be missing the point in view of the meticulously detailed accounts of suffering and death in the witnesses’ testimonies in Weiss’s play. In what sense, it might be argued, in the face of such pain, is it appropriate to focus on how that pain is articulated? Why does this matter at all? These final questions pertain to this book and to the literary study of the Holocaust in general. What practical difference does thinking

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about the literary remembrance of the Holocaust make to those who suffered and died? On a basic, practical level – which in relation to the immediacy of physical suffering is almost the only level that matters – the answer is, of course, none. In Horkheimer’s words, ‘The past injustice has happened and is over. The slain are really slain.’15 The babies, children, women and men who suffered and died cannot be made not to suffer, nor to live. Neither can we change the unacceptable ways in which they suffered and died. Kertész makes the same point in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, ‘Heureka!’: The problem of Auschwitz is not whether to draw a line under it, as it were; whether to preserve its memory or slip it into the appropriate pigeonhole of history; whether to erect a monument to the murdered millions, and if so, what kind. The real problem with Auschwitz is that it happened, and this cannot be altered – not with the best, or worst, will in the world.16 All the authors whose texts I consider wrestle with the value of writing about the Holocaust. How much more questionable then is the value of writing about the writing about the Holocaust. If writing literature after the Holocaust is partly legitimated by the resort to literature within the camps by some Holocaust victims – as Levi describes in relation to Dante’s Inferno in If This Is A Man – and the justification for prayer after the Holocaust can be established on the basis of prayer during it, by Metz and others, how can literary criticism after the Holocaust be justified, which certainly had no role in providing a voice for anyone’s suffering during it? Eaglestone has given one of the most convincing answers to this question in his description of the role of post-Holocaust literary interpretation as that of ‘“witness” to the saying in the language of literature’.17 Literary critics are to attempt to do what Celan says that no one does, to bear witness for the witnesses. Benjamin’s response to Horkheimer, in which he proposes that historical sufferings might be made to matter again by attending to history as an act of remembrance – with which many of those whose ideas I have discussed would agree – is another way of formulating the responsibility of bearing witness to the witnesses. Remembrance does not change the past, but if it is undertaken actively, as I have repeatedly shown in relation to the literary operation of memorial Vergegenwärtigung, it does make the past matter in the present. Remembering as disconsolation contributes to the fulfilment of that basic and most fundamental of responsibilities after the Holocaust, of

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ensuring that it doesn’t happen again, by changing the conditions of how we live afterwards as a consequence of what happened. Writing about writing about the Holocaust, as long as it avoids Langer’s trap of convenient explanation, is one way of remembering. As a retort to W.H. Auden’s contention that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, Hill has often characterized the task of poetry in terms of a formulation suggested in 1935 by the critic Richard P. Blackmur.18 Blackmur writes that: ‘The art of poetry is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse by the animating presence in the poetry of a fresh idiom; language so twisted and posed in a form that it not only expresses the matter in hand but adds to the stock of available reality.’19 Hill suggests his own summary of how poetry ‘adds to the stock of available reality’ after the Holocaust in a phrase from the end of The Triumph of Love which I have repeatedly quoted in this study: ‘a sad / and angry consolation’. Hill’s phrase shows how literary remembrance is inevitably an inadequate redress for past sufferings, including those of the Holocaust, as well as how literary remembrance knows this about itself, and makes that knowledge available to its readers in order that, in remembering, we resist the consolations of remembrance itself. Readers remain unconsoled and ready to remember again. Readers of Holocaust literature, including those who also write about it, need to remain aware that individual acts of reading are not enough to fulfil the duty of active remembrance towards those who died. Steiner suggests how the reader might approach this duty in reading Wiesel’s Night by re-copying the book, ‘line by line, pausing at the names of the dead and the names of the children as an orthodox scribe pauses, when re-copying the Bible, at the hallowed name of God’.20 Remembrance, as Friedlander suggests, is a process, and not a discrete event. This literary reinterpretation of Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance is part of what keeps us within a process of disconsolation. The authors I consider conclude that Judaeo-Christian categories are inadequate to the literary task of Holocaust remembrance, but they remain relevant precisely by virtue of their inadequacy, since part of the challenge of responding to the Holocaust, which their texts variously enact, is in conveying the inadequacy of existing conceptual resources – including theological and linguistic ones – to accomplish that response. Atonement is unavailable, and so acts of confession, anamnesis and testament are ongoing. It is in this sense of themselves as ceaseless acts of self-interrupted remembrance that literary responses to the Holocaust ‘add to the stock of available reality’.

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The stock of available reality clearly involves many dimensions other than the literary ones I have considered here. The question then arises as to whether the disconsolate remembrance existing in literary responses to the Holocaust can influence other aspects of reality, and if so, how. Can this kind of disconsolation inform post-Holocaust politics, for example? Adorno and others have argued that politics and social policy after the Holocaust ought to entail a sense of radical unease arising from their self-consciousness about the continuity of some political and social relations before and after Auschwitz. Only by questioning every aspect of cultural conditions and finding new ways of contracting civic responsibilities which take account of individual particularity can we guard against the recurrence of Auschwitz. A politics predicated on disconsolation is one which, as Grass describes in his Nobel Prize speech, takes the literary lesson of ‘keeping the wound open’ to heart. Such a basis for political life, enshrining suffering as its founding motivation, starts to sound rather like the Christian myth, as Kertész has noted.21 It runs counter to the rationale of the prevailing model of Western government as the capitalist democracy which is motivated by utilitarian principles and in which a progress-oriented politics of consensus seeks general, legislative solutions for the collective social problems of its citizens. Such societies institute days of public commemoration like the Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January in Britain which, as many commentators have noted, serve to do anything but keep the wounds open by providing a consoling ritual format for passive remembrance. James Young argues persuasively that the duty of remembrance is better served by the debates about how to commemorate the Holocaust that take place within these societies than the memorials and other modes of public commemoration that emerge as a result. Disconsolate remembrance is more likely to be sustained in the continuation of differing perspectives about remembrance that a debate entails than the memorial consensus that the results of such a debate commonly establish. Levinas’s post-Holocaust ethics, based on his sense of the infinite responsibility towards the other as the grounds for subjectivity, offers one way of construing alterity as the basis for social and political relations. Part of Levinas’s definition of the liberal state is the expectation of its being ‘always concerned about its delay in meeting the requirement of the face of the other’.22 Significantly, Levinas also points to the possible literary origins of the subject’s necessary orientation towards otherness. One of the problems of presenting

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Levinas as a model is the relative ease with which his thinking may be invoked to serve disparate intellectual ends, which ultimately mitigates against it serving any of them very well. Another potential problem, to which this study in particular is exposed, is the explicit theological motivation of Levinas’s project. My partial justification for the claim that there is a literary reliance upon (even if this is a subversion of) religious modes of remembrance, by referring to a theory of ethical relations which also depends upon a reinterpretation of a theological relationship, starts to seem regressive. Diane Perpich summarizes the different sorts of opposition to Levinas from Richard Rorty and Dominique Janicaud in their shared assertion that Levinas’s ethics depends on an ‘unjustified theological metaphysics’ and ‘can be convincing only to those committed to a positive religious tradition’.23 Criticism of Levinas advanced on these grounds points to the potential for his ethics to offer a pseudo-metaphysical consolation, rather than the kind of disconsolation which I am arguing might provide an ethical foundation for post-Holocaust politics. Perpich defends Levinas by showing how his approach to otherness can be interpreted as a recognition of the other’s singularity, which simultaneously resists the temptations of universalizing the other and claiming to be able to represent (including in the political sense of representation) their particularity. Perpich maintains: Singularity shuttles between the demand to be represented and the refusal of representation. It is the driving force of an ethics that demands politics – laws, institutions, formal mechanisms of representation, justice – but also the sting of conscience that calls those same mechanisms into question in the name of one more other who has yet to be heard, yet to be made visible.24 Perpich’s insight regarding the singularity of the Levinassian other convincingly establishes a position from which Levinas can be defended against the charges of both positivist metaphysics and an inadequate commitment to the others embodied in a multicultural society. Her notion of singularity does similar work, in a different context, to my thesis of disconsolate remembrance. The predication of an ethical relationship upon a singular rather than a universal conception of the other which is therefore alert to particular ways of living and of suffering, makes possible the kind of awareness which might permit a politics of disconsolation, premised on the requirement to remember others’ sufferings during the Holocaust and the prior

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knowledge of the inevitable inadequacy of any such attempt. So while the disconsolate remembrance enacted in the literary texts I have considered might present – via Levinas – a desirable model for political relations after the Holocaust, it is not a model which is readily assimilated into current political systems, since these largely depend upon the reconciliation or at least the containment of differences rather than seeking to perpetuate conditions in which differences remain unreconciled. In the texts I have examined, and for those who read and write about them, what is at stake in the response to the Holocaust is the preservation of a condition of disconsolation in the remembrance of the Holocaust. This, inevitably, is easier said than done, which is why, in this study, I have focused on the textual structures of address as the places where saying happens and disconsolation perseveres. NOTES 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

L.L. Langer, ‘Remembering Survival’, in Geoffrey Hartman (ed.), Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Cambridge, MA and London: Blackwell, 1994), pp.70–80, see p.79. C. Beals, Levinas and the Wisdom of Love (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), p.1; C.F. Alford, Levinas, the Frankfurt School and Psychoanalysis (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), p.1. See G. Hill, The Triumph of Love (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p.82. See S. Felman and D. Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.81–2. See P. Celan, Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), pp.185–6. See Langer, ‘Remembering Survival’, pp.74–5. Ibid., p.70. D. Tracy, ‘Christian Witness and the Shoah’, in Geoffrey Hartman (ed.), Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Cambridge, MA and London Blackwell, 1994), pp.81–9, see pp.83–4. Ibid., p.84. Ibid. E. Wiesel and M. de Saint-Cheron, Evil and Exile, trans. J. Rothschild and J. Gladding (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), p.155. See E. Levinas, Proper Names, trans. M.B. Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p.6. D. Williams, ‘The Book of the Week: Geoffrey Hill: Collected Critical Writings’, The Times Higher Education, 20 March 2008. S. Burnside, ‘Remembering the Past, Confessing for the Future’, in J. Steinert and I. Weber-Newth (eds), Beyond Camps and Forced Labour: Current International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution. Proceedings of the International Conference 2006 (Osnabrück: Secolo, 2008). See W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–), N8,1, p.589.

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

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See I. Kertész, ‘Heureka!’, trans. I. Sanders, PMLA, 118, no.3 (2003), pp. 604–14. See R. Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p.170. For example, in Hill’s conversation with Rowan Williams during a conference on his work ‘Geoffrey Hill and His Contexts’ at his alma mater, Keble College, Oxford, 2 July 2008. I attended the conference and was a member of the audience during this conversation. R.P. Blackmur, Form and Value in Modern Poetry (New York: Doubleday, 1952), p.349. See G. Steiner, Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1967), p.168. See I. Kertész, Galeerentagebuch, trans. K. Schwamm (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1999), pp.32–3. E. Levinas, On Thinking-of-the-Other: entre nous, trans. M.B. Smith and B. Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p.203. D. Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), p.5. Ibid., p.198.

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Index Please note that page numbers relating to Notes will have the letter ‘n’ following the page number. A Double Dying (Rosenfeld), 96 Abbott, Scott H., 143 Abraham, covenant with God, 33, 36 absolution, 56, 98 actualization (Vergegenwärtigung), 8, 17– 19, 25, 31, 32, 34–6, 43, 110, 136, 165; remembrance as, 126–33 Adorno, Theodor W., 2, 6, 18, 29, 38, 39, 41, 45, 46, 97–8, 108, 113, 141, 168, 188, 200, 204; Aesthetic Theory, 185; ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’, 5, 15; Negative Dialectics, 111, 117, 120, 130, 150, 200, 219; Notes to Literature, 107 ‘After Auschwitz’ (Rubenstein), 139 afterlife, 71 Alford, C. Fred, 112 allusions, 87 Ambrose, Saint (of Milan), 78 Amishai-Maisels, Ziva, 99n Amos (Biblical figure), 39 anamnesis: in Danzig, 141–9; Eucharistic, 9, 45, 114–18, 123, 126, 221; novelist prose as, 118–21, 149; origins, 149; Platonic concept, 109–10, 121 Anglican Church, confessional practices, 56 antiphons (short verses), 72 anti-Semitism, 9, 18, 44, 119, 140 aphasia, 67, 205 Aquinas, Thomas, 56 Archades Project, The (Benjamin), 15 Arendt, Hannah, 132

Arnds, Peter, 154n Arnold, Heinz Ludwig, 110 art, 6, 108 Ash Wednesday, 69 ‘Atemwende’ (breath-turn), 67, 86, 97, 98 atheism, 166 atonement, 66, 98, 227 Auden, W.H., 227 Augustine, Saint, 69, 82, 97 Auschwitz, 4, 30, 32, 110, 140, 228; Grass on, 118–19; Kertész on, 119, 121–2; role of prisoners and guards, 192; trial (1964–65), Frankfurt, 159, 164, 182, 192, 195, 200, 209; Weiss on, 174–5; see also camps, Nazi; Holocaust Austin, J.L., 113, 127, 128, 177 ‘Ave Maria’, 78–9 azkârâh (sacrificial term), 36, 37 Bair, Deirdre, 170, 175, 176 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 113, 123, 124, 127, 224 balsam, 54, 81, 82, 86, 87, 88, 91, 94 Bate, Herbert Newell, 115 Bayley, John, 57 Beckett, Samuel, 9, 31–2, 159–218; criticism of, 159–60, 180, 186; Endgame, 160, 185, 188, 190, 200; Happy Days, 203; human condition, portrayal of, 160, 203; post-Holocaust drama, 167; on religion, 175–80; resistance work, 171; ‘Text for Nothing’, 178–9; The

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Unnamable, 187, 190; Waiting for Godot, 159, 160, 162, 165, 169, 179, 186, 196, 200–8 Belated Witness, The (Levine), 10 Benjamin, Walter, 15–16, 17, 23, 31, 36, 43, 45, 46, 47, 120, 148 Benveniste, Emile, 19 Berger, Alan L., 167 Berghahn, Klaus L., 193, 194 brit (covenant), 32, 162; see also covenantal remembrance Berlin, 172 Berlin Holocaust memorial, 23 Best, Otto F., 199–200 Bethany, anointing of Christ in, 87, 92, 93 Bible see Hebrew Bible; New Testament; Old Testament ‘Bidden Guest, The’ (Hill), 82 Bigsby, Christopher, 196 Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche), 134 Bitburg military cemetery, 2 bitter herbs, 90 Blackmur, Richard P., 227 bleeding, 91 Blustein, Jeffrey, 3 botany, 82, 90; see also specific plants bracing pieties, 165 Bradby, D., 205 Bremen, Germany, 172 Bremen Prize for literature (1958), 59 Brode, Hanspeter, 147 Bryden, Mary, 176, 178 Buber, Martin, 62, 64 Buchenwald, 110 burial customs, 20 Busi, Frederick, 205 Butler, Lance St John, 176 Cain (Biblical figure), 96 Calvin, John, 56 camps, Nazi, 99n, 168, 190, 198, 205, 226; concentration camps, 118, 121, 126, 129, 131, 171, 189, 200, 207; death camps, 72, 74, 160, 171; portrayal of aftermath in Endgame, 190; see also Auschwitz; Buchenwald; concentration camps; Holocaust

capitalism, and Nazism, 192 caritas, 79 catastrophe, 163, 203 Catholicism, 54, 56, 59, 64, 118, 224; and Grass, 142; and National Socialism, 143; see also confession Celan, Paul, 9, 10, 33, 36, 54–105, 123, 126, 130, 169, 174, 220, 223, 226; Der Sand aus den Urnen, 87; Die Niemandsrose, 64, 68; ‘Festland’, 91–2, 93; ‘The Meridian’, 60, 67; Mohn und Gedächtnis, 87, 88, 92; Sprachgitter, 63, 65, 70, 82; ‘Stimmen’ (voices), 82–4, 85, 86 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 95 Childs, Brevard S., 27, 28, 29, 30, 32 Christianity: anti-Semitism, 119; Beckett’s declared contempt for, 176; Christian remembrance, evolution, 41–4; complicity with Nazi persecution of Jews, 9; liturgical worship in, 130; and responsibility for the Holocaust, 198; salvation, 87, 95, 114, 132; see also Catholicism; Jesus Christ; Protestantism Church of England Book of Common Prayer, Catechism in, 127 circumcision rite, 33, 34 Clarke, Neville, 116 Cohan, Stevan, 148 Cohen, Arthur A., 44 Cohen, Richard A., 55 Cohen, Robert, 196 Cohen, Sara D., 138 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 62–3, 64, 81, 82, 96 collective memory, 21, 23, 25–6, 30 communal remembrance, 123–6 communication, verbal, 124 concentration camps see camps, Nazi confession: in Catholicism, 54, 56; Christian practices, 56; and Jewish antecedents for Christian worship, 44; non-confessional language of witness, 65; poetry as, 53, 55–81, 161; versus prose, 124 Confessions (Augustine), 82, 90, 97 Connerton, Paul, 21, 22, 30, 42–3, 45

Index 253 consolation, 98, 227 contrition, 56, 68 Council of Trent, 95 covenant, 45; covenantal remembrance, 32–6; between God and Abraham, 33, 36; between God and Jewish people, 32–3; between God and Moses at Mount Sinai, 34–5, 36; between God and Noah, 33, 36; obedience to, 166; and testament, 206–7; voluntary, 34, 166, 199, 206 crisis of address, 61, 177 crisis of literature, 168 Critchley, Simon, 113, 186–7, 200, 204 crucifixion see under Jesus Christ culpability, 57 cultural memory, 164 culture, powers of, 199 culture industry, 133 Cunliffe, W.G., 147 dangerous memory concept, 117, 118, 222 Dante (Durante degli Alighieri): Divine Comedy, 161, 175, 181, 182, 189, 193; Inferno, 94, 210, 226 Danzig Trilogy (Grass), 121, 141–9, 153n Davies, Paul, 164 de Pressensé, Edmond, 20 death camps see camps, Nazi Der Sand aus den Urnen (Celan), 87 Derrida, Jacques, 19 desanctification of remembrance, 1–13, 33 Descartes, René, 113, 223 Deuteronomy, 22, 30, 35, 40 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno), 38 dialectical images, 16 Dialogic Imagination, The (Bakhtin), 123 dialogue, covenants of, 32 ‘Dialogue on Thinking-of-the-Other’ (Levinas), 113 diary entries, 11, 111, 119, 121, 125, 131 diatheké, 162

Die Blechtrommel (Grass), 121, 141, 224–5; Oskar Matzerath’s narrative in, 142–8, 224 Die Ermittlung (Weiss), 159, 160, 162, 164, 165, 169, 172, 174, 186, 188, 189, 191–200, 210; and Divine Comedy (Dante), 181, 182, 183–4; ‘The Loading Ramp’, 195; ‘The Song of S.S. Corporal Stark’, 197 Die Niemandsrose (Celan), 64, 68 Die Rättein (Grass), 148 Diner, Dan, 4 disconsolation, remembrance as, 219– 32 Divine Comedy (Dante), 161, 175, 181, 182, 189, 193 divine remembrance, 30 Dix, Dom Gregory, 115, 116–17 Döblin, Alfred, 126, 127, 144 docudrama, 164 documentary theatre, 188–9 Double Dying, A (Rosenfeld), 160 drama, as testament, 159–218 Driver, Tom, 175 ‘Dryden’s Prize-Song’ (Hill), 58 Durkheim, Emile, 21 Eaglestone, Robert, 55, 226 Eckardt, A. Roy, 9 Eichrodt, Walther, 35 Elbogen, Ismar, 18, 55–6, 135 Ellis, Roger, 196 Endgame (Becket), 160, 185, 188, 190, 200 enforced reconciliation of remembering, 2, 12 Enlightenment, 44 Erpresste Versöhnung (enforced reconciliation), 2, 12 Esau (Biblical figure), 83 Eskin, Michael, 55 essence, 87 ethical imperative, 209 Ethics and Infinity (Locatelli), 202 Eucharist, 35, 44, 63, 73, 74, 82, 92, 107, 131, 132; Eucharistic anamnesis, 9, 45, 114–18, 123, 126, 221; and Kaddish, 139–40; as memorial, 115–16; as ‘Sacrament of

254

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Remembrance’, 115; and Second World War, 145 Exodus 34, 34 extermination camps see camps, Nazi Ezekiel (Biblical figure), 30 faith, 94 faithlessness, 149 Fateless (Kertész), 138–9, 149 Felman, Shoshana, 61, 165, 168, 169, 177, 179, 191, 195 Felstiner, John, 70 ‘Festland’ (Celan), 91–2, 93 Fiasko (Kertész), 125 Final Coming, 177 Fishbane, Michael, 40 flood, Biblical, 33 For the Unfallen (Hill), 57 forgetfulness, 3 forgiveness, 2–3 Foster, Dennis A., 96 Foucault, Michel, 95, 109 Fourth Lateran Council (1215), 56 free will, 166 Freud, Sigmund, 109 Friedlander, Albert H., 23, 25, 27, 40, 46, 99n, 167, 222 Friedländer, Saul, 4, 5 ‘Funeral Music’ (Hill), 79, 87 Funkenstein, Amos, 25, 26 futurity, human sense, 19–20 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 19, 20, 74 Galeerentagebuch (Kertész), 111, 119, 128, 129, 134 gall, 82, 88, 89, 90, 91, 94 gallows-tree image, 83 gas chambers, 4, 140, 197; see also camps, Nazi; Holocaust Genesis, 83 Germany, post-war, 172 Ginn, Richard J., 117 Glatstein, Jacob, 166 God: as both absent but hypothetically present, 133, 176–7; covenant with Jewish people, 32–3; enforced obedience to, 166; man’s disappointment in, 163; in Waiting for Godot, 204, 206

‘God and Philosophy’ (Levinas), 113 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 199 Gore, Charles, 162 Gospels, 74, 92, 93, 94, 221; of John, 89; of Luke, 78, 89; of Mark, 89; of Matthew, 68, 89; portrayal in Waiting for Godot, 202, 203 Grass, Günter, 6, 9, 31, 36, 107–57, 174, 224, 228; on Auschwitz, 118– 19; Die Blechtrommel, 121, 141–3, 144, 145, 146, 148, 224–5; Die Rättein, 148; Hundejahre, 121, 125, 143; Katz und Maus, 121, 144; Mein Jahrhundert, 121, 131; Waffen-SS membership, 110, 120, 131 Graver, Lawrence, 205–6 gravestones, 207–8 Greek Bible, 162 Green, Ruth M., 155n Greenberg, Irving, 24, 32, 34, 46, 166– 7, 199, 206, 222 Gregg, David, 115, 116 Guide to Mourners, A (Green), 155n guilt, 57, 59, 66, 174 Gussow, Mel, 186 Habermas, Jürgen, 2–3 Haiduk, Manfred, 172, 188, 189 Halbwachs, Maurice, 20, 21, 22, 23, 41, 42, 43, 44, 169 Hall, Katharina, 131, 148, 151n, 154n Happy Days (Beckett), 203 Hartman, Geoffrey, 65, 82, 163–4, 168, 169, 194, 225 Haughton, Hugh, 57 Hebrew Bible: acts of remembrance in, 126; bitter herbs in, 90; covenantal relationships in, 32–6, 45; Deuteronomy, 22, 30, 35; Exodus 34, 34; memory in, 8, 17, 26–41, 128; versus New Testament, 149; psychological conception of remembrance, 24; sacrificial rituals in, 40, 45; zkr root in, 27, 28, 31, 36, 45, 149; see also Old Testament Heidegger, Martin, 125 Hepworth, Mike, 56, 95 Hervieu-Léger, Danièle, 21

Index 255 Heschel, Abraham J., 28, 35 heteroglossia, 123, 124, 133, 154n, 224; prosodic, 125, 150 Hill, Geoffrey, 9, 54–105, 107, 123, 126, 130, 174, 219, 223; ‘The Bidden Guest’, 82; ‘Dryden’s PrizeSong’, 58; ‘Funeral Music’, 79, 87; ‘History as Poetry’, 53; The Orchards of Syon, 57, 60, 67, 69, 92, 94; ‘Our Word Is Our Bond’, 60; ‘September Song’, 72; Style and Faith, 60; Tenebrae, 68–81, 86, 223; The Triumph of Love, 57, 69–70, 95, 97, 98, 227; For the Unfallen, 57 historical materialism, 15–16, 17, 23 historical memory, 25, 164 historiographical approach, 4 history, and memory, 25 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault), 95, 109 Hoffman, Lawrence A., 45 Hollington, Michael, 6 Holocaust, 170–5; ceremonial discourse, 122; duty to remember, 151; German civilians’ indifference regarding fate of Jews, 120; historiographical approach, 4; literary responses to, 1–2, 3–4, 6–7, 41, 160, 183, 190, 208, 226; remembering see remembrance; sanctification process, 2; secular remembrance, 26; specific significance in Judaeo-Christianity, 37; see also Auschwitz; Buchenwald; camps, Nazi; remembrance ‘Holocaust industry’, 2 Holocaust Memorial Day (27 January), UK, 228 Holocaust Poetry (Rowland), 97 Horkheimer, Max, 16, 38, 39, 41, 119, 148 Hosea (Biblical figure), 39 How Societies Remember (Connerton), 21 Huggan, Graham, 147 humanism, 199 Hundejahre (Grass), 121, 125, 143 Huppert, Hugo, 64

Hurtado, L.W., 43 Hutchings, William, 180, 201 hyssop, 89, 90 Ich – ein anderer (Kertész), 111, 121, 129, 131, 134, 140, 150, 155n Idelsohn, A.Z., 135, 136 imitatio Christi principle, 143 Inferno (Dante), 94, 210, 226 Institutes of the Christian Religion (Calvin), 56 intellectual property, Auschwitz perceived as form of, 121–2 intersubjective reorientation, 28, 54–5, 62, 66, 113–14, 167, 168 Isaac (Biblical figure), 83–4 Isaiah (Biblical figure), 39 Israel: Its Life and Culture (Pedersen), 27 Jacob (Biblical figure), 83, 84, 85 Jacobs, Steven L., 32, 166 Jacobsen, Josephine, 179–80 Janicaud, Dominique, 229 javelin, 89–90 Jeremiah (Biblical figure), 34, 69 Jesus Christ, 73, 74, 78, 79, 91, 117, 126, 177; anointing of in Bethany, 87, 92, 93; crucifixion, 68, 80, 89, 90, 91, 94, 99n, 119, 128, 145, 202; see also Christianity Jewish Book Week (2006), 111 Johansson, Birgitta, 176, 179, 213n John (New Testament), 89 Joyce, James, 177, 201 Judaeo-Christian tradition, 1, 4, 7–12, 17, 24, 27, 29, 38, 42, 43, 66, 75, 107, 108, 220, 221, 222, 223, 227; insufficiency of forms of remembrance following Holocaust, 8, 54; negative significance of phrase, 44 Judaism, 30, 43, 137, 178, 198; Kaddish in, 130, 136; liturgical worship in, 130; mourning rites see Kaddish; portrayal of Jewishness in prose, 137, 138; relationship with Christianity, 18, 28, 40, 41, 42, 44, 117, 118, 130, 140

256

Index

Kaddish, 44, 130, 133–41; and Eucharist, 139–40; of Renewal, 135, 136 Kaddish for a Child Not Born (Kertész), 44, 111, 114, 119, 122, 124, 134, 140, 141, 224–5 Katz und Maus (Grass), 121, 144 Keenan, Dennis King, 39 Kertész, Imre, 9, 31, 33, 36, 107–57, 224; ‘Diary novel’ (Tagebruchroman), 111; Fateless, 138–9, 149; Fiasko, 125; Galeerentagebuch (Diary from the Galleys), 111, 119, 128, 129, 134; Ich – ein anderer, 111, 121, 129, 131, 134, 140, 150, 155n; ‘Jergz könyv’, 125; Kaddish for a Child Not Born, 44, 111, 114, 119, 122, 124, 134, 140, 141, 224–5; Liquidation, 129, 130, 131, 132; ‘The Union Jack’, 111, 129, 130, 131, 139 Kertzer, Adrienne, 138–9 Kien, Peter, 172 Kilpatrick, G.D., 115 knowledge, Platonic concept, 20, 109 Knowlson, James, 171 Kobler, John, 170 Kohl, Helmut (former Chancellor of Germany), 2–3 ‘Kristallnacht’ (1938), 145, 172 LaCapra, Dominick, 5 Lamentations of Jeremiah, 69 Lamont, Rosette C., 180 Lang, Berel, 37 Langer, Lawrence L., 163, 164, 168, 169, 191, 209–10, 220, 225 language, 57, 113, 127, 167, 220; and forms of remembrance, 10, 17, 19, 22, 29, 33, 36; German, 59, 60, 170; institutional, 19; philosophical, 125; phony, 122; poetic, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 68, 69, 79, 85, 86, 177; ritual, 22 Lanzmann, Claude, 165 Last Supper, 115, 116 Laub, Dori, 163, 165, 168, 177, 179, 185, 191, 195, 210, 220, 221, 225

Leeder, Karen, 61 Leeland Kundert-Gibbs, John, 186 Levi, Primo, 163, 210, 226 Levinas, Emmanuel, 18, 61, 79, 85, 127, 150, 165, 167–8, 222, 223; ‘Dialogue on Thinking-of-theOther’, 113; ‘God and Philosophy’, 113; Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 55, 60, 112, 201, 219; post-Holocaust ethics, 228–9; Totality and Infinity, 112 Levine, Michael G., 10 Lewis, Gilbert, 22–3 Liquidation (Kertész), 129, 130, 131, 132 literary form, testament as, 184–208 literary responses to Holocaust, 1–2, 3–4, 6–7, 41, 160, 183, 190, 208, 226; see also specific writers and works ‘living voice’, 31, 225 Locatelli, Carla, 180, 201–2, 213n logocentrism, 201 Longest Shadow, The (Hartman), 163 Lord’s Prayer, 135 Lyon, James K., 62, 64 Mandelstam, Osip, 65 Mark (New Testament), 89, 90 marriage, sacrament of, 128 Masterman, E.W.G., 135 Matthew (New Testament), 68, 89, 90 McGreevy, Thomas, 175, 177 McNees, E., 79, 80 ‘Meaning of Working Through the Past, The’ (Adorno), 5, 15 Mein Jahrhundert (Grass), 121, 131 memory: collective, 21, 23, 25–6, 30; cultural, 164; dangerous memory concept, 117, 118, 222; in Hebrew Bible, 8, 17, 26–41, 128; historical, 25, 164; of Holocaust see remembrance; individual, 20; neuro-science, 20–1; and religion, 20, 22; ritual context, 123; social, 21; war against, 46 memory industry, 2 ‘Meridian, The’ (Celan), 60, 67 Messiah, ‘delayed’, 79 metaphysical transcendence, 111–12

Index 257 Metz, Johann Baptist, 117, 118, 141, 145, 150, 222, 226 Meyerhofer, Nicholas J., 64, 67 Micah (Biblical figure), 39 midrash, 8 Minden, Michael, 148 Misere (penitential psalm), 89 mitzvah, 28 Mohn und Gedächtnis (Celan), 87, 88, 92 Morrill, Bruce T., 117 Moses, covenant with God at Mount Sinai, 34–5, 36 Mueller, William R., 179–80 Murdoch, Iris, 6, 109 ‘My Place’ (Weiss), 174 myrrh, 84, 89 myrtle leaf, 84–5, 86 mysticism, 42 Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition, The (Cohen), 44 Narrating the Holocaust (Reiter), 53 narratives, 5, 6 National Socialism, and Catholicism, 143 Nazi past, confronting, 173–4 Negative Dialectics (Adorno), 111, 117, 120, 130, 150, 200, 219 neo-Freudian theory, 5 neuro-science, 20–1 New Testament, 28, 34, 69, 87, 90, 117, 161–2, 206; versus Hebrew Bible, 149 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 134 Noah (Biblical figure), 33, 36 nocturns, 68–9, 90, 103n Noth, Martin, 35 novelist prose: as anamnesis, 118–21, 149; precise description in, 122, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133, 134 Odysseus, myth of, 38–9 Oesterley, W.O.E., 36, 40, 44 Old and New Covenants (Greek Bible), 162 Old Testament, 22, 26, 43, 117, 161–2, 206; and poetry, 69, 71, 72, 74, 83,

86–7, 94; see also Deuteronomy; Exodus 34; Genesis; Hebrew Bible Olschner, Leonard, 62 ‘On the Concept of History’ (Benjamin), 17 onlooker position, 168 Ophir, Adi, 2 oral testimonies see testimony, survivor Orchards of Syon, The (Hill), 57, 60, 67, 69, 92, 94 Original Sin, 57 Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Levinas), 55, 60, 112, 201, 219 ‘Our Word Is Our Bond’ (Hill), 60 paraphrasia, 205 ‘Pardoner’s Tale’ (Chaucer), 95 Paris Review, The, 58, 148 Passover, 89 patriarchs, 34 Pedersen, Johannes, 27–8, 31 penance, 54, 56, 68, 95 penitence, 59, 68 penitential liturgy, Jewish, 55–6 penitential psalms, 72, 89 penitential remembrance, 68 performative utterances, 127, 128, 177, 204 Perpich, Diane, 229 Plato, 20, 109–10, 121; Phaedo, 122 play-texts see Beckett, Samuel; Weiss, Peter Poems (McGreevy), 177 poetry, 53–105, 124; as ‘Atemwende’ (breath turn), 67, 86, 97, 98; balsam and gall, 54, 81–95; as confession, 53, 55–81, 161; crisis of address, twentieth-century German poetry, 61; distance of poet from death of the victims, 61; postwar poetic language, 60; versus prose, 125; as responsible behaviour, 59; Tenebrae, 54, 68–81 politically motivated remembrance, 3 Pordzik, Ralph, 60 prayer, 177, 178 precise description, in prose, 122, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133, 134 Proper Names (Levinas), 167

258

Index

prose, 124 prosodic form/heteroglossia, 125, 126– 7, 150 Protestantism, 56 psalms, 31, 39, 40; Passion Psalms, 90; and poetry, 68, 69; Psalm 22, 90; Psalm 69, 90; Psalm 88, 29–30; in Tenebrae, 69, 73, 78 psychoanalysis, 108–9, 168, 191 Quaker testimony, 56 Raphael, Lev, 167 Rawicz, Piotr, 96 Reagan, Ronald (former President), 2 Real Presences (Steiner), 156n Reddick, John, 153n redemption, 16, 36, 114 refuge, 77 Reif, Stefan C., 135–6 Reiter, Andrea, 53 religion: Beckett and Weiss on, 175–84; and memory, 20, 22; and ritual, 19–26 religious scepticism, 79–80 remembrance: active, 15; as actualization, 126–33; attending to history as act of, 226; Christian, evolution of, 41–4; communal, 123–6; covenantal, 32–6, 45; as deliberate act, 121; desanctification of, 1–13; as disconsolation, 219– 32; divine, 30; doubt about, 150; duty of, 149–50, 151; as ethical duty towards victims, 6; forms, 45– 7; as habit, 4; individual acts, 4; for its own sake, 121–3; JudaeoChristian tradition see Judaeo-Christian tradition; liturgical, 221; politically motivated, 3; redemptive potential, 16, 36; and ritual, 2, 23–4, 161; sacramental, 9, 30, 47, 107; sacrificial, 36–41, 45; testamentary, 201 repentance, 40, 66 resin, 87, 91, 92 restitution, 40 Resurrection, the, 63

revelation, 78 Ricks, Christopher, 79 ‘Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ (Coleridge), 62–3, 81, 82, 96 ritual(s): dogmatic interpretation, 42; and memory, 123; and religion, 19– 26; and remembrance, 2, 23–4, 161 Robinson, Peter, 97, 204 Roman Catholicism see Catholicism Rorty, Richard, 229 rose, 91 Rosenfeld, Alvin, H., 63, 96, 160, 162, 192, 209 Roskies, David G., 7, 8, 99n, 163 Rothberg, Michael, 97–8 Rouault, Georges, 69 Rowland, Antony, 57–8, 97 Rowley, H.H., 40 Rubenstein, Richard, 139 Rushdie, Salman, 131, 150 sacrament: of marriage, 128; penance, 54; sacramental confession, 109; sacramental remembrance, 9, 30, 47, 107 sacrifice, purposes, 36 sacrificial remembrance, 36–41, 45 sado-masochism, 77, 78, 171 salvation, 17, 38, 88, 91, 135, 136, 202, 206; Christian, 87, 95, 114, 132; secular, 178 Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (Bryden), 176 satisfaction (penance), 56 saying, acts of, 177, 195, 196, 202, 203, 204, 205, 210; see also utterances; voices Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 20 Schneider, Alan, 187 Schweizer, Harold, 67 Scott, Dominic, 109 Sebald, W.G., 193, 194 Second World War: and Eucharist, 145; and Holocaust, 170–5; sufferings of German civilians during, 3 secular liturgy, 46 secular remembrance of Holocaust, 26 Seidman, Naomi, 37 selihot (penitential prayers), 55–6

Index 259 ‘September Song’ (Hill), 72 Sherry, Vincent, 76, 79, 80 Sherwin, Byron L., 163 Shires, Linda, 148 Signer, Michael A., 24 silence, 66, 67, 189–90, 209 sin, 56, 57, 90 Smith, C. Ryder, 24 social memory, 21 Socrates, 109, 122 soul, 109 speech acts see saying, acts of ‘speechless dead’, 66 speechlessness, 67, 86, 204; see also silence Spiegelman, Art, 167 Sprachgitter (Celan), 63, 65, 70, 82 Stadler, Arnold, 69–70, 71, 75 Steiner, George, 133, 156n, 199, 210 ‘Stimmen’ (Celan), 82–4, 85, 86 style, 58 Style and Faith (Hill), 60 stylization, 122 suffering, 3, 6, 117, 119, 190–1, 197, 204, 206, 221, 226; see also catastrophe Suied, Alain, 59–60 Survival in Auschwitz (Levi), 210 survivors of Holocaust: duty of care to, 2; testimony, 10, 163, 164, 168, 169 Sykes, Marjorie H., 116 Tailleur, Jean, 187 Tal-Coat, Pierre, 160 tallow candles, 88 Talmud, interpretation, 1 Tambling, Jeremy, 56, 95, 96 Taylor, Chloë, 95 Teichman, Milton, 159, 160, 210 Temple, destruction, 166 Tenebrae (Hill), 54, 68–81, 86, 223; second stanza, 73, 76, 80; third stanza, 73, 78–9; fourth stanza, 81; sixth stanza, 80, 81; seventh stanza, 80; antiphons (short verses), 72; dead in the poem as Jews in Holocaust, 71–2; Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for, 76; expressions of faith in, 81; nocturns, 68–9, 90,

103n; poetic styles, 80–1; psalms, 69; see also Hill, Geoffrey testament: Biblical, 192, 206, 207, 210; and covenant, 206–7; ‘living dead’, 207, 208; terminology, 162, 179– 80, 192 Testament of Samuel Beckett, The (Jacobsen and Mueller), 179–80 testamentary drama, 159–218; actualizing testamentary model, 165; religion, Beckett and Weiss on, 175–84; Second World War and Holocaust, 170–5; testament as literary form, 184–208; see also witnessing testimony, survivor, 10, 164, 168, 169, 186, 196, 211n, 212n, 225; act of testifying, 187; artistic treatments, 165; Auschwitz trial, 164; bearing witness to the witness, 226; documentary testament, 189; location of testamentary act and its witnessing, 188; Yale project, 163, 196 ‘Text for Nothing’ (Beckett), 178–9 Theatetus, 109 theology, 17, 22, 26, 33, 34, 148; Biblical, 35, 40; ‘concealed dwarf ’, 42; Judaeo-Christian, 114, 179; political, 117; post-Auschwitz, 112; post-Holocaust, 30, 32, 34, 36, 79, 112, 136, 179, 180, 181, 206; sacramental, 128 Theresiendstadt, 172 Third Meditation (Descartes), 113, 223 thorns, 91 ‘Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit’ (Rosenfeld), 160 thrçskeia (ideas connected with cult and piety), 19 Tobias, Rochelle, 105n Todorov, Tzvetan, 118 totalitarianism, 130 Totality and Infinity (Levinas), 112 Tracy, David, 221 transference theory, 5 trauma, working through, 5 Travers, Michael, 69 Treblinka, 147

260

Index

Triumph of Love, The (Hill), 57, 69–70, 95, 97, 98, 227 unction, oils of, 92, 93, 94 ‘Union Jack, The’ (Kertész), 111, 129, 130, 131, 139 Unnamable, The (Beckett), 187, 190 Urio, Aaron, 116, 117 utterances, 114, 123, 124, 204; performative, 127, 128, 177, 204; ritual, 22; see also heteroglossia; saying, acts of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (‘working through the past’), 5, 15 Vergegenwärtigung (‘actualization’) see actualization (Vergegenwärtigung) Vice, Sue, 63 vinegar, 89, 90, 91 Virgin Mary, 91 voicelessness, 67, 86, 204; see also silence voices, 82–3; ‘dead voices’, 159, 162, 179, 186, 191, 208; ‘living voice’, 31, 192, 225; see also heteroglossia; utterances voluntary covenant, 34, 166, 199, 206 von Ranke, Leopold, 23 Wager, Walter, 181 Wainwright, Jeffrey, 57, 97 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 159, 160, 162, 165, 169, 179, 186, 196, 200–8, 209; act of waiting, 203–4; futility shown in, 203; Lucky’s monologue, 205–6, 207, 208, 210; plot, 202–3; question and answer response, 202; repetitive phrases and unfinished sentences, 208 Warren, W., 24 Weisberger, Lucie, 172 Weiss, Peter, 9, 31–2, 36, 159–218, 225; Die Ermittlung (The Investigation), 159, 160, 162, 164,

165, 169, 172, 174, 181, 182, 183– 4, 186, 188, 189, 191–200; Fluchtpunkt (Vanishing Point), 173; ‘My Place’, 174; personal experiences, 196–7; on religion, 180–4 Whichcote, Benjamin, 60 Wiesel, Elie, 15, 40, 46, 163, 166, 222, 227 Wilson, Christopher C., 134 Wilson, Katharina M., 134 wine, 88, 89, 91 Winslow, Jack C., 56 witnessing/bearing witness, 7, 10, 34, 114, 221, 222, 225; ‘collapse of witnessing’, 179; ‘crisis of witnessing’ during Holocaust, 177; eyewitnesses, 31, 131, 165, 169; of forgetting to remember, 191; God as chief witness, concept, 179; indirectly bearing witness, 191; Judaeo-Christian belief, 161–2; and poetry, 60, 61, 65, 67; secondary witnessing, 57, 97, 169; secular witnessing, 167; Weiss, portrayal by, 197; see also testamentary drama; testimony, survivor Work in Progress (Joyce), 177 worship, sacrificial, 39 woundwort, 93–4 Wright, G.E., 43 writing, as remembrance, 132 Yale, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at, 163, 196 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 25, 46, 164 Young, James, 7–8, 9 zâkhar (memory), 27, 29, 30; see also memory Ziolkowski,Theodore, 148 Zipes, Jack, 170, 171 Zirker, Hans, 31, 32, 35, 165 zkr concept, Hebrew Bible, 27, 28, 31, 36, 45, 149