Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

Edward Kanterian, February 2002

Of course, the Holocaust is not exclusively a German problem. While it was a crime perpetuated by the National Socialists, it has a significance that goes beyond geographical boundaries and historical fact. The question of German guilt, especially now, after unification, remains a moral obligation for this country, whose current and future generations have a right to learn about what happened in the past, but also to be assured that they themselves bear no direct responsibility for it.

Every four or five years, I offer a seminar at Bard College entitled “Literature and the Holocaust.” I don’t teach the course more frequently because I wish to avoid developing rhetorical routines I could fall back on in discussing this difficult topic. The first thing I tell my students is that the Holocaust is not only a Jewish tragedy, though it was above all a tragedy for the Jews. The Holocaust was a tragedy for the Germans as well, and, indeed, for all mankind.

*The German writer Martin Walser, in his acceptance speech on receiving the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers’ Association at the Book Fair in 1998, warned against the “permanent representation” of the Holocaust in the mass media as an enduring argument against Germany and the Germans. He also spoke of the media’s use of the Holocaust as a “moral cudgel.” Walser’s speech has provoked a broad controversy in the German press and a high rate of popular approval. However, some intellectuals and Jewish representatives have criticized his way of mentioning only German “shame” (never “guilt”), of suggesting that foreign pressure, not Germany’s inner postwar evolution, has imposed the Holocaust Memory, and of using the term Errinerungsdienst (memory service) that echoes the Nazi term Arbeitsdienst (labor service) or Wehrdienst (military service).

I can understand Martin Walser’s irritation. No doubt it was provoked above all by the way in which the memory of this tragedy has repeatedly been commercialized, trivialized, and even instrumentalized to various ends (including political ones). I have to say that for a Jew — above all for one who has his own memories of that horror — it is not easy to come to terms with the sensationalist notoriety that surrounds this terrible wound and shame. I see this matter rather differently than do the activists of many Jewish and non-Jewish organizations who, with the melodramatic pathos of the “good cause,” invoke the catastrophe again and again, to the point of exhaustion, until all that remains is tedium.

When I arrived in the United States, I was surprised to see what a huge quantity of literature had been written about the Holocaust. Bit by bit, a fully-fledged industry had come into being to keep the memory alive. Enough survivors were ready to participate in bizarre, theatrically earnest exorcisms which took the form of ostensibly spontaneous discussion sessions before all sorts of audiences. But I also found people who took a critical, even sarcastic, approach to this mechanism of supply and demand.

On my own, I came to combine tolerance and skepticism in my attitude toward the freedom of expression enjoyed by the masses in this consumer democracy. That I (like Walser, presumably) would have preferred to keep alive the memory of this tragedy in a different way doesn’t much change matters. After all, what would the alternative have been? If poetry did not cease to exist after Auschwitz, why should other expressions of life in its various manifestations cease, whether they belong to the “higher spheres” or are of more banal, “humble” origin? Without this “lower sphere,” life could not go on. The Holocaust, after all, did not become well known primarily through sophisticated forms of representation.

As overwhelming as it was, the Holocaust did not put an end to the course of human existence. Life went on, outside the sphere of memory, but also within and in relation to it.

Reactions to the Holocaust are no less various and contradictory than other human responses, for even this barbarism was the work of humans, not demons: it came neither from hell nor out of nothing. Some sacralized the tragedy, others denied its existence; some suffered silently from the wounds they bore, still others took it as a basis for investigation, pity, hate, revelation, revenge, despair. Unfortunately I am not religious, but I must confess that the Jewish prohibition on pronouncing the name of God or making images of him has always struck me as somehow more appropriate than the naïve fairy tale iconography of other religions. Perhaps I’d have been satisfied to have the catastrophe known as “the Holocaust” similarly enshrouded in a solemn, dignified silence. But I am not sure if there can be any solution to this dilemma.

Perhaps Samuel Beckett described the problem best. Not long after the war, in 1949, he wrote “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.” In the more than fifty years that have passed since it took place, the general public response to the Holocaust has changed from silence to a more and more open and insistent reappraisal, to the current state of saturation. Expression has taken a variety of forms: documents, memoirs, reminiscences, diaries, debates, novels, poems, films, plays, works of art. Many of these works are minor, but many are original, authentic, and striking. The substantial repercussions in the mass media, sparked less by the most significant works than by the products appealing to the general public, have kept the memory of these events alive in the public imagination.

This dilemma was brought home to me in particular by the success of Schindler’s List. I entered the movie theater curious and apprehensive. The audience, primed by the full-blown advertising campaign, awaited the film in reverent silence. When it was over, the optimistic finale received tumultuous applause as the dead and the living came together to sing about a dream come true: the thousand-year-old hope which had become Israel, a home to yesterday’s refugees. Surely only a very few members of the audience recognized in this didactic Hollywood cliché the very same solution that social realism had once offered for all artistic, and not only artistic, dilemmas in the communist world. And just as few, apparently, were those who were taken aback by the simple “functionality” of the picturesque characters, the spectacular improbability of their relations to one another, and the film’s whole ineffably kitschy aura. (Seen from such a perspective, the hero’s long melodramatic final speech to those he’s saved reaches far from enviable heights.) Even fewer of the satisfied consumers who had partaken of this cheap trick were able to offer resistance to the trite, moralistic message of this commercial masterpiece by invoking their own experiences in the concentration camps.

That so few were able to resist guaranteed the film’s success: a success, one could perhaps say (and this would not be the only paradox of the reality we live in), that will ensure the memory of the Holocaust for coming generations, who will have neither their own memories of this tragedy nor any reason to occupy themselves with it.

The applause in the movie theater, which gave the film’s consumers the agreeable sensation of participating briefly in a victory, continued afterwards at the live ceremony in which the director, smiling among the spotlights, received his Oscar — a scene that would have deserved to be spliced into the film. In his acceptance speech, the recipient of the award reminded the audience that there were still a good 300,000 surviving “Holocaust experts,” and encouraged schools, nursing homes, and cultural institutions to use them and popularize their sufferings. Needless to say, I was more horrified than flattered by my sudden promotion to the “endangered experts” category.