The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival 9781503616820

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THE BELATED WITNESS

Cultural Memory tn

the Present

Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

THE BELATED WITNESS Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival

Michael G. Levine

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

2006

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University All rights reserved. THE IMAGES by Art Spiegelman in Chapters 2 and 3 are reprinted from:

Comix, f:Ssays, Graphics, and Scraps: From MAUS to Now to MAUS to Now, © 1998 by Art Spiegelman. Reprinted with the permission of the Wylie Agency. MAUS J· A Survivor's Tale. My Father Bleeds History, copyright© 1973, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House. MAUS Jl: A Survivor's Tale. And Here My Troubles Began, copyright © 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House. THE POEMS AND EXCERPTS OF POEMS by Paul CeJan are reproduced from:

1'vfohn und Geddchtnis, © 1952 and 1955 by Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Miinchcn, Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH. Used by permission of the publisher. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner. Copyright© 2001 by John Felstiner. Used by permission of W. W Norton & Company. This book has been published with the assistance of Barnard College. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levine, Michael G. The belated witness: literature, testimony, and the question of Holocaust survival I Michael G. Levine. p. cm.-(Cultural memory in the present) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8047-3080-6 (cloth : alk. paper)-tSBN o-8047-5555-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature. 2. Holocaust survivors' writingsHistory and criticism. 3· Literature, Modern-2oth century-History and criticism. 4· Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Psychological aspects. I. Title. II. Series. PN56.H551.49 2006 8o9' .93358-dc22 Typeset by Classic Typography in nlr3.5 Adobe Garamond

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Contents

Acknowledgments r. Introduction 2.

xz

I

Necessary Stains: The Bleeding of History in Spiegelman's MAUS r I6

3· The Vanishing Point: Spiegelman's

MAUS II

4· Writing Anxiety: Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood and the Throat of the Witness

62

IOI

5· Toward an Addressable You: Ozick's The Shawl and the Mouth of the Witness I24

6. Silent Wine: Celan and the Poetics of Belatedness

Notes

I89

Bibliography Index

233

225

I69

Acknowledgments

This book has grown out of conversations with students and colleagues over the past decade. When I began teaching courses on Holocaust historiography, testimony, literature, and film in the mid-1990s, I was not prepared for the tremendous challenges my students and I would face. I have learned a great deal from the students at Yale University, Barnard College, Cornell University, and New York University who took part in these classes, and I am deeply grateful to them for their thoughtful questions and unsettling reflections. I owe a special debt of thanks to John Felstiner, who introduced me to the work of Paul Celan in the early 1990s. His sensitivity as a translator and generosity as an interlocutor are greatly appreciated. The manuscript is much improved thanks to the feedback and encouragement I received at critical moments from Ulrich Baer, Bella Brodzki, Cathy Caruth, Stanley Corngold, Shoshana Felman, Andrew Frisardi, Deborah Geis, Geoffrey Hartman, Marianne Hirsch, Janet Jacobsen, Richard Klein, Anna Kuhn, Dominick LaCapra, Dori Laub, David Levin, Anne-Marie Levine, Maya Maxym, John Michael, Daniel Purdy, Esther Rashkin, Peter Rudnytsky, Ilana Szobel, Georges Van Den Abbeelc, Sheri Wolf, Sidra Ezrahi and her wonderful students at Hebrew University, and especially Jared Stark. This book could not have been written without the institutional and collegial support of Judith Shapiro, Elizabeth Boylan, and Richard Gustaf~on at Barnard. I would also like to thank Eric Trump, who prepared the index, and my research assistants, Meredith Doster and Melanie Flamm, for all their hard work. Generous support of the project was provided by a Yale University Faculty Fellowship and a Littauer Fund Grant for Research in Jewish Studies. I am grateful to Helen Tartar, who first encouraged me to bring the project to Stanford University Press, for her guidance, vision, and intellectual integrity. My sincere thanks as well to Norris Pope,

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Acknowledgments

Mariana Raykov, Rob Ehle, and Angie Michaelis at Stanford for helping this book into the world. Finally, I would like to thank my wonderful wife, Juliann Garey, to whom I dedicate this book, and our children, Gabriel and Emmanuelle, for their patience, love, and unwavering support. Abridged versions of Chapter 2 appeared in American Imago, Special Issue on Memory, Post-memory, and False Memory after the Holocaust, vol. 59, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 317-41, and in Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman's "Survivor's Tale" of the Holocaust, Deborah Geis, ed. (University of Alabama Press, 2003), 63-104. An earlier draft of Chapter 4 was published in Diacritics, vol. 27, no. 2 (Summer 1997): ro6-23. Portions of Chapter 5 appeared in Teaching the Representation ofthe Holocaust, Hirsch and Kacandes, eds. (The Modern Language Association of America, 2004), 396-411. Chapter 6 is a revised version of an article previously published in New German Critique, Special Issue on Paul Celan, no. 91 (Winter 2004): 151-70. I thank these publishers for permission to use this material.

THE BELATED WITNESS

1

Introduction

"We wanted to survive so as to live one day after Hitler, in order to be able to tell our story," Helen K. tells interviewers at the FortunoffVideo Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. 1 This book attempts to listen to such stories and, in doing so, to explore the relationship between narration and survival, between a desire to survive in order to tell and the equally intense need to tell-and to be heard-in order to survive.2 The book is also, more enigmatically, an effort to listen to stories carried by the survivor that exceed his or her capacity to access and relate. It is this element of excess and the impact of these untold stories upon the lives of Holocaust survivors and their children that is at the heart of Art Spiegelman's MAUS: A Survivor's Tale, discussed at length in Chapters 2 and 3. The subtitle of the first volume of MAUS, My Father Bleeds History, conveys a sense not only of physical injury, but of psychical wounding and emotional anguish. It suggests that the literally unbearable pain of the first generation will have spilled over somehow into the next, that the still unassimilated historical experience of the father will have bled through the pages of the "survivor's tale" drafted by his son. Spiegelman's highly resonant and unsettling metaphor draws our attention, in other words, both to a certain hemorrhaging of his father's story and to the spaces between the frames of his own Holocaust "co mix," to openings in the body of his work where something else appears to be going on-something that could not be contained as an object of narration, that could not

2

Introduction

be framed in picrures or in words, that could not be communicated as the discrete content of an eyewitness account, be it the account of the father or the son. The following chapters seek to develop ways of attuning ourselves to this clement of excess in Holocaust writing, to that "something," in the words of]ean-Fran.\. l't\l$01tERS .,.0!\IC.El) ~ER~ SEfi'IAAtE. '0\f.'t Got &£.1"1'£1'. ~REI'I1>, &U't £1\C\-\ fEW MON'tl-1$ "0\~ ~$0

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Spiegelman's

MADS II

89

of the scene as a space between frames-as a space that does not belong, strictly speaking, to the scene depicted and that nevertheless marks the precise point in the depiction where one passes from a superficial view of things as they appear above ground to an insider's look at what was to have remained hidden below. The passage reads: "Special prisoners worked here separate. They got better bread, but each few months they also were sent up the chimney. One from them showed me everything how it was" (2:70). This strategically framed visual transition also marks a crucial shift in the testimonial function. As though to suggest that the passage from above to below, outside to inside, surface to depth, light to darkness, were also and above all a movement from seeing to blindness, the eyewitness, who had heretofore helped us to see through the German strategy of effacement, through the camouflage of a building that "looked so like a big bakery" (2:70), appears from this point on as a guide himself in need of guidance, an eyewitness whose own limited vision must now be supplemented and prosthetically extended by the gaze and voice of another. With the sudden appearance on the testimonial scene of this other eyewitness, himself a survivor of that grayest of zones, the Sonderkommando, the term "seeing through" begins to take on a very different sense. As is the case elsewhere in MADS, the introduction of such a witness has the effect of transforming the testimonial scene in fundamental ways. First and most obviously, it draws attention to the limits of Vladek's own eyewitness account. Indeed, if "one of the special prisoners" is made to appear at the very point Vladek is about to proceed to a description of the underground undressing room and the gas chamber adjacent to it, it is because, contrary to his initial claims, Vladek could never have spoken first-hand, could never really have testified "from the inside," about what went on there. His testimony remains in a certain sense stuck at this crucial point of transition. Indeed, if there is movement here, it is merely from one threshold to the next-from the space between frames, in which the "other eyewitness" is first introduced, to the closed door of the undressing room viewed from the top of the stairway leading down to it in the panel below. The latter doorway marks the point at which Vladek's own eyewitness account ends and that of the other witness begins.

90

The Vanishing Point

Yet, because this movement from threshold to threshold is never simply linear, this same doorway must be viewed both as a point of transition-an ending/beginning-and as an intransitive impasse where the process of ending begins again, begins ending, as in Beckett's Endgame, over and over again. Never quite ending or beginning as such, the eyewitness testimonies of these two survivors instead become increasingly implicated in one another. Thus, while the narrative perspective is henceforth implicitly that of the other unnamed witness, his point of view is not recognizably different from Vladek's own. Moreover, as these two perspectives gradually merge into one the closer they come to the gas chamber, the text's ultimate vanishing point, the term "perspective" itself (never used as such but structurally very much on the scene here) takes on an odd resonance. What is at stake at this point is not just the meaning of a particular word but the status of that which is effectively stained and brought into focus through a certain literalization of "perspective." Making one see this "perspective" as if for the first time in its very opacity, the text not only compels one to see seeing as a problem, but also and above all to see double when "seeing through" the all too transparent perspective of the "other witness." If it is through this witness's eyes that one is given to view that which few others would ever live to see or describe againboth the actual operation of the gas and the functioning of the Germans' self-effacing strategy of effacement-in looking through him one is also made to see the witness himself as effoced, that is, as a witness become thoroughly transparent in the utter collapse and total eclipse of testimonial perspectives that occurs here. 31 Consider then the "voice-over" narration (of one voice covering over another) that accompanies the series of panels leading up to the actual door of the gas chamber. "They came to a big room to undress their clothes what looks so, yes-here is a place so like they say. And everybody crowded inside into the shower room, the door closed hermetic, and the lights turned dark. It was between 3 and 30 minutes-it depended how much gas they put-but soon was nobody anymore alive. The biggest pile of bodies lay right next to the door where they tried to get out" (271) (fig. 25). While it is clear that Vladek could not have known first-hand about the operations and struggles depicted here, he speaks at this paint as if he did. In doing so, he not only effectively usurps the place of the other, but

Spiegelman's MAUS

II

91

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