Winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism
This important an original book is the first sustained analysis of the unique ways in which oral testimony of survivors contributes to our understanding of the Holocaust. It also sheds light on the forms and functions of memory as victims relive devastating experiences of pain, humiliation, and loss.
Drawing on the Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, Lawrence L. Langer shows how oral Holocaust testimonies complement historical studies by enabling us to confront the human dimensions of the catastrophe. Quoting extensively from these interviews, Langer develops a technique for interpreting them as we might a written text. He contrasts written and oral narratives, noting that while survivor memoirs by authors such as Primo Levi and Charlotte Delbo transform reality through style, imagery, chronology, or a coherent moral vision, oral testimonies resist these organizing impulses and allow instead a kind of unshielded truth to emerge, just as powerful in its impact as the visions taking shape in written memoirs. He argues that it is necessary to deromanticize the survival experience and that to burden it with accolades about the âindomitable human spiritâ is to slight its painful complexity and ambivalence. Finally he explores the perplexing task of establishing a meaningful connection between consequential living and inconsequential dying, between moral striving and the sprit of anguish and sense of a diminished self that pervades these haunting Holocaust testimonies.
Industry Reviews
Another scholarly, provocative incursion into the vast and forbidding domain of oral Holocaust histories, pursuing ideas in Langer's earlier studies (Versions of Survival, 1982; The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, 1975, etc.) and blazing a new trail by analyzing the psychology behind these accounts as distinct forms of human memory. Continuing to condemn those who would view positively all testimony, oral and written, of Holocaust survivors as reaffirming the indomitability of the human spirit, Langer (English/Simmons College) focuses again on the oral material, for the most past as recorded on videotape for the Fortunoff Archive at Yale, to demonstrate the severe distress in those shattered lives, and the immensity of their trauma unameliorated by the passage of time. The survivors are still victims of their experience, and the degree of victimization separates into certain types of destructive memory, ranging from "deep memory," the remembrance of ethically untenable acts that now have no place in the common moral universe the survivor ascribes to, to "unheroic memory," where incidents feed the individual's guilt for having survived, a matter of chance or "choiceless choice" under the circumstances, but resulting in a diminished sense of self, even self-negation. Other modes of memory enter the classification system as well - anguished, humiliated, tainted - each of which focuses on a particular aspect of evidence in the oral testimonies as indicating the survivors' overwhelming inability to come to terms with what happened to them. Nietzsche, in his work on the meaning of history, and the ideas of Maurice Blanchot provide frequent points of methodological reference as accounts are reviewed and compiled, and special attention is paid to the videotaped interviews themselves, because the images recorded serve as corroboration and tangible proof of the Holocaust's chilling psychological effect. A well-reasoned and challenging work, useful both as history and historiography, and certain to be influential in future Holocaust studies. (Kirkus Reviews)
