Challenging "Holocaust Conformism"

Shattering myths and turning over applecarts seem like noble and worthwhile endeavors. We like it when moldy ideas and people are pushed out of the way for the new and exciting. However, what if the applecart you upset belongs to a Holocaust survivor and the myth you shatter is so ingrained into the public consciousness of Western civilization that it has metamorphosed from myth into political stance?

The essay, "Who Owns Auschwitz? by Irme Kertész and the book Still Alive, A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, by Ruth Kluger are controversial narratives by Holocaust survivors that take strong and opposing views to vent the authors' frustrations with civilized society's response to the Holocaust. These survivors' dissatisfaction stems from an inability to "describe the indescribable" and a public willingness to accept inadequate explanations as a form of resolution, recovery or restitution. While the texts have remarkable similarities, the differences lie in who each author says is responsible for unrealistic representations of the Holocaust and in the respective calls-to-action that follow their indictments. Kluger places blame on society, saying that we must reshape our vision of the Holocaust and that appropriate responses will follow. Kertész points the finger of blame at survivors themselves and states, "the only road to liberation is through memory" and that it is incumbent upon survivors to keep a memory that is accurate and not given to "complacent satisfaction" or shaded by "the balsam of self-pity" (268).

Irme Kertész is Hungarian concentration camp survivor and winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature. In "Who Owns Aushwitz?" Kertész speaks of Holocaust "kitsch" and offers three definitions of it:1) "Any representation of the Holocaust that fails to imply the wide-ranging ethical consequences of Auschwitz / and from which the PERSON emerges from the camps healthy and unharmed." 2) "Works where Auschwitz is simply a matter between Germans and Jews." and 3) "Anything that is kitsch" (270). With these definitions as a guide, he then takes on one of the sacred cows of the Holocaust canon, the movie Schindler's List. Kertész points out that "for the Holocaust to become a part of public consciousness, the price for public notoriety had to be paid" (267). That price includes a "stylization," or an "affected abstraction" of the Holocaust in literature and films like Schindler's List as well as in public discourse that misses the point, minimizes the effects of the Shoah and mistakenly categorizes its place in human history. Kertész goes on to say, "We fail to hear the real question / How will the world free itself from Auschwitz, from the burden of the Holocaust" (268).

Ruth Kluger is a Viennese-born scholar who is professor emeritus of German Literature at the University of California. At age 11, Nazis took her from her home in Vienna to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and a year later to Auschwitz, where she survived through the kindness of a female SS aide who encouraged her to lie about her age. Heralded in Europe as a great achievement in literature, her memoir, Still Alive, met with mixed reviews when released in the United States in 2001.

Kluger echoes Kertész's theme of the "Holocaust being stolen from its guardians." She cites examples of "sensitive citizens" and "politicians who want to display their ethical credentials" (63) who co-op the Holocaust to support their own aims.

Kluger puts forth that the memorialization of the Holocaust through museums and pictures is also a trivialization of the experience. She says, "The missing ingredients are the odor of fear emanating from human bodies, the concentrated aggression, the reduced minds" (67). Her invective includes everyone: sensitive Germans, a younger generation, artists and survivors themselves. She asks the question, "Why?" Meaning why do we choose to look for good to come out of senselessness? She points out that Holocaust survivors are not able to process their experiences through the handy responses that non-survivors choose to embrace, saying, "We don't get off so easy. The ghosts cling to us. Do we expect that our unsolved questions will be answered for us if we hang on to what's left: the place, the stones, the ashes" (64)?

So the question remains: What was, or is, the Holocaust and how should we respond to it?

Kertész, quotes his own work, Diary from the Galleys to say, "The concentration camp is imaginable only and exclusively as literature, never as reality" (268). He warns survivors of the "drive to survive" which forces them to "lie as long as possible" about the Holocaust. He also describes a "drive to remember," which "seduces" survivors into a "complacent satisfaction," and "self-glorification" (268). These phenomena spring from a "natural longing" among survivors for an answer to the unanswerable question that haunts them: How can we free ourselves? Kertész feels that this answer can only be found through literary and artistic representations of the "truth" and cites examples of this that include Jean Amery, Paul Celan and interestingly, Ruth Kluger.

Kluger is more adamant and less optimistic. She states that the Shoah experience was different for each person and comes out against those who think, "Their deaths were unique and can not be compared to other losses or atrocities" (64). She counters the intellectual inclination to make sense out of the chaos by saying, "Auschwitz was no instructional institution / you learned nothing there, least of all humanity and tolerance. Nothing good came out of it," and further opines that the camps were "the most useless, pointless establishments imaginable" (65).

Kluger says that museum culture, remembrances of the Holocaust as spectacle and the institutionalization of the Holocaust by "usurpers" all fall short of describing the indescribable. By her account, the "unsorted, collective memory" (66) that spawned these responses is to blame. Kluger asks us to form timescapes (67)-a new word for a new theory-which acknowledge the nature of a place in time and cast off the intellectual property of Holocaust conformism.

Both these writers speak to the process of describing the indescribable, a recurring theme in Holocaust literature. Both point out that existing descriptions are inadequate. To remedy this, Kertész calls for survivors to be diligent in their rejection of kitsch, while Kluger asks each individual to redefine their understanding of the Holocaust and look at the phenomenon from a new perspective that is untethered from preconceived notions. This may require that we shatter the myths of Holocaust conformism and even upset the applecarts of some survivors.

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As Kertész wrote, perhaps the only means of describing the indescribable is through artistic or literary representation. I have often contemplated George Segal's sculpture, "The Holocaust," at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Overlooking the Pacific Ocean at the edge of the Western world, this powerful work depicts concentration camp prisoners lying dead on the ground while one man is standing, his back to the dead, looking out through barbed wire over the Golden Gate. I used to experience this figure as a man grappling with survivor guilt. I see him now as a fellow traveler, pondering one of life's unanswerable questions: What is a human being?

Scientists, theists and poets have provided conflicting answers to this question; I can only offer my own confusion.

Works Cited:

Kertész, Irme, "Who Owns Auschwitz?" The Yale Journal of Criticism, volume 14, number 1.

(2001): 267-272

Kluger, Ruth, Still Alive, A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. New York: Feminist Press at the

City University of New York, 2001. Print.