The Role of the Novel in Holocaust Literature

Murder. Means nothing to the ear. In English it could even be glamorous …
Murder.
And there are worse substitutes for feeling: Passed Away; Just Reward; A Long Illness.
And the most inadequate word of them all: Holocaust. A nothing category; a eunuch of a word.
A Jewish term, anyway. To them it has significance. To the rest of this numb world …
                                         —Stefan Kanfer, The Eighth Sin

Human tragedy has always given rise to great novels; which is not to say that only novels with a tragic theme qualify for greatness or that tragedy can be justified because it results in outstanding literature. The poverty of Dickensian England or the serfdom of Tolstoy’s Russia for example or, in our own time, the gulags of Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet Union or the Orwellian nightmare of Kundera’s Czechoslovakia, have all resulted in great novels. One might propose with justification that without adversity great literature would be impoverished.

Real-life tragedies that beset the Jewish people, especially in Russia and Eastern Europe between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, resulted in a school of outstanding Yiddish writers that included Sholem Aleichem, Israel Zangwill, I.L. Peretz, Lamed Shapiro and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Using story-telling to describe the minutiae of existence in the impoverished shtetls and ghettos in which Jews lived, these authors were able to re-create the characters who survived in lands where anti-Semitism was ingrained in the national psyche and regular pogroms took on the flavour of religious festivals, which they sometimes were.

Although based on actual events, their stories were not written as history; they had a more profound function. Underlying them was an exposition of the motivations and behaviours that are manifestations ot the human condition. Jewish stories, despite their often humorous twists, are more than mere entertainment; they raise questions that civilised man often prefers to ignore; such questions prick consciences, they burrow below the surface of injustice.

In his essay “Religion and Literature” T.S. Eliot said, “the ‘greatness’ of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.”

Not all Yiddish stories were beautifully written, nor could all of them be considered great, but all qualify as literature. They survive because they expose human nature in ways that history cannot. Moreover, whether we admit it or not, the faces reflected in the mirror of Jewish writings might well be our own.

Pursuing a similar theme to Eliot, Wolf Mankowicz writes in respect of Jewish literature:

It is not then for purely literary qualities that one reads Yiddish authors—they are often undisciplined, long-winded when they should be brief, clipped when we would wish them to be expansive. But they all write out of the full feeling of their moments with truth and immediacy; it is their authenticity which recommends them.

In the last fifty years a great deal has been written about the most deplorable human tragedy of all time, the Holocaust of European Jews. Much of it has comprised historical, documentary and biographical material produced by social historians, political scientists, victims and survivors. The works are startlingly authentic. They are factual, often based on personal experience and official documentation, and are motivated both by a need to record history while it is fresh in the memories of those who experienced it, and to ensure that the enormity of the event is etched indelibly into the memory of the human species.

Not only is it essential that factual accounts of the Holocaust are read by future generations, they may also have immeasurable cathartic and therapeutic value for contemporary society, including the individuals who wrote them. Despite their archival worth, however, these works rarely capture the essence of reality. Cold facts merge into one another presenting the reader with knowledge but not comprehension. Together with even colder statistics, they frequently divert readers’ thoughts from the terrified and suffering individuals to an anonymous collection of victims.

We know the statistics of the destruction, have seen news footage, heard the voices of both survivors and perpetrators, but the predicament that the Holocaust presents us with is that cold facts do not translate into reality; our imagination cannot grasp the extent of the calamity any more than it can appreciate concepts like time running backwards or curved space. As Sidra Ezrahi says, “The imagination loses credibility and resources where reality exceeds even the darkest fantasies of the human mind; even realism flounders before such reality.” Stalin said: “One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.”

When it comes to trying to understand how the people of a nation that epitomised the flowering of the European Enlightenment utilised their country’s vast resources to make mass murder into a national goal, we are left with another unanswered question. From a neuropsychological perspective, the issue is not the fact that the primitive reptilian brainstem is capable of erupting through the essentially civilised cortex, but why the Nazis and those who supported them were happy to utilise the weapons of reptilian barbarism to pursue behaviour they knew was evil. Notwithstanding the efforts of Holocaust historians, chroniclers and survivors, there is, as yet, no answer to this question.

An attempt to answer it was Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996). In confronting the question, “How could the Holocaust happen?” he says, “what can be said about the Germans cannot be said about any other nationality or about all of the other nationalities combined—namely no Germans, no Holocaust.”

The actions of other nationalities who happily participated in the Nazi bloodbath (including Ukrainians, Croats, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians) suggest otherwise. But even if Goldhagen is correct, the problem with this approach is that it separates Germans from the human species at large. In effect, he is saying that the Germans are different from other people—a sort of Neanderthal mutation, separate from the main stream of Homo sapiens.

Herein lies both a weakness and a danger in his argument. Portraying Germans as something other than ordinary humans implies the possibility that they cannot be held accountable for their behaviour. Unlike “normal” human beings, they might have inherited a neural deformity that manifested itself in extreme anti-social actions. Perhaps they could not help themselves. Juxtaposed with this proposition is the implication that non-Germans might have behaved differently, even more humanely; but many didn’t.

Although the people who planned and carried out the Holocaust were mainly of German origin, they were first and foremost human beings; people like you and me and, dare one say it, like Goldhagen himself. This should never be forgotten lest it lead one to conclude that German Nazis were not wholly responsible for their behaviour, and that such a catastrophe could not have been initiated and organised except by Germans.

It is sometimes said in defence of the Nazis that all people are capable of murder and savage behaviour. No one doubts this. However, there is a vast gulf between our ability to commit crime and our actually committing it. Consequently, this argument is no defence. A truly civilised person is not one who never has evil thoughts, but one who chooses not to act upon them.

Those who doubt the proposition that all people are capable of evil acts might recall the classic experiment of the American psychologist Stanley Milgram, who forty years ago demonstrated that a group of adults could be induced to obey authority even if it meant betraying their own moral values. In his experiment volunteers participated in what they believed to be the torture of anonymous subjects by the application of electric shocks.

The volunteer torturers were not psychopaths but a cross-section of ordinary Americans between twenty and fifty years of age who came from a range of educational backgrounds and occupations. Few of them raised objections to the orders they received; some actually exceeded them!

People who ask “How could the Holocaust have happened?” are asking the wrong question. Given the frailties of human nature combined with almost 2000 years of Church-inspired anti-Semitism, the more pertinent question may be “Why did it take so long to happen?” The answer lay in the ability of twentieth-century technology to kill on an industrial scale.

If there is a lesson to take from the Holocaust, it is that the criminal activities of ordinary people, Germans and others, are founded on human nature—not one of a uniquely Nordic variety. Only by accepting this can we investigate, analyse, postulate and, with luck, reach any sort of comprehension about the motives that led normal human beings to indulge in depravities on a scale never before imagined.

Although a number of eminent Jewish writers, including Elie Wiesel, I.B. Singer, Saul Bellow, Andre Schwartz-Bart, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Bernard Malamud, Chaim Potok, Primo Levi and George Steiner have taken the Holocaust as their theme, fictional treatment of the tragedy is still in an early stage. There may be several explanations for this.

The events of the Holocaust are too recent and clear in the consciousness of many people for them to be written about except in a wholly factual way. Smoke from the crematoria of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen has yet to disperse. The voices of the dead still cry out to be heard.

It might also be argued that only Holocaust survivors have the right to describe it, although, as Yehuda Bauer warns, “The extreme insistence on the right of only the direct survivors of the Holocaust to describe it, deal with it, analyze it, and agonize about it, is in effect a death sentence on any understanding of the ‘epoch-making event’.” Although we cannot expect Holocaust survivors to provide answers or understanding, their accounts must form the bedrock upon which subsequent writings, including fiction, must be based.

A further reason why a fictional approach to the Holocaust is yet to be fully developed is that proposed by Lionel Trilling who, when discussing the decline in the art of the novel, wrote:

Indeed, before what we now know the mind stops; the great psychological fact of our time which we all observe with baffled wonder and shame is that there is no possible way of responding to Belsen and Buchenwald. The activity of mind fails before the incommunicability of man’s suffering.

Echoing this view, Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), “There are no parallels to life in concentration camps … Its horrors can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside life and death.”

In line with this theme, perhaps the most important reason for our inability to treat the Holocaust comprehensively is the sheer enormity of the event and our inability to absorb it into our psyche. Massacres are nothing new but never before have the resources of the state (its bureaucracy, legislature, industry, infrastructure, military forces) been focused on the degradation, humiliation and ultimate destruction of a single class of people. Even Stalin’s liquidation of the Kulaks was supposed to be a means to an end, not an end in itself.

In the Nazi mindset, war eventually became of secondary importance to the annihilation of Jews. Facing defeat in 1945, Germany continued to give railway priority to the transport of Jews to death camps over the transport of war materials.

The atrociousness of the crime is beyond human comprehension. It is so foreign to our relatively uneventful lives, so completely outside our experience, so grotesque an event in human history that we have yet to come to terms with it and perhaps we never will.

Given that most of us cannot grasp the enormous tragedy of the Holocaust, it is not surprising that some would like to see accounts and investigations of it put to one side. For instance, there are those whose suppressed guilt leads them to feel that Jews are partly to blame for their own misfortune. As Edward Alexander says, “Strong as is the modern liberal instinct to exculpate the criminal, the modern liberal tendency to inculpate not only society but the victim himself is yet stronger.”

For others like David Irving, who are unable to digest historical truth, re-writing history is a comfortable option. Denying the reality of the Holocaust has now become the main activity of those who wallow in the filth of anti-Semitism.

Even Elie Wiesel, one of the best-known survivors of the Holocaust, has said, “The event seems unreal, as if it occurred on a different planet … Did it really happen? I often wonder.”

Finally there are those who, although they sympathise with the tragedy of Jewish experience, feel that we have heard enough about the Holocaust, that it is time to move on (after all, it happened over seventy years ago). Perhaps this is the most condescending and unforgivable attitude of all. In reality, is it possible for us to move beyond the Holocaust, to evolve into better human beings? Elie Wiesel wrote meaningfully, “at Auschwitz, not only man died but also the idea of man”. No doubt he meant the ideal of man as a noble creature.

Before the Holocaust, the notion that man was something other than a mere animal had a reasonable basis; love, compassion, charity, altruism, notions of beauty and hopes of ultimate redemption set him apart from the animal kingdom, as did the idea that there existed within each of us a spark of the divine with which we might conquer our base instincts. These were the foundations upon which human optimism was built; now they are shattered. The Holocaust set back the human species to the point where hope of moral progress may be no more than a mirage. Anyone who suggests that the Holocaust can be swept out of sight is living in a fantasy world; we must confront the possibility that there will be no redemption for Homo sapiens.

The Holocaust must not be relegated to a sort of limbo, outside our consciousness, just because there are no more facts to be discovered. The problem of the contradiction within human nature that can lead apparently good people to behave like criminals needs to be explained; we need to know why a mind that is capable of reaching the pinnacle of exquisite beauty and love can simultaneouly wallow in the depths of murder and cruelty.

If the Holocaust seems like the fiction of a pathological mind, then to reach some understanding of it, we may need to turn to the art of fiction writing. However, there are thinkers such as Theodor Adorno who question whether it is possible or even moral to write about it. And Elie Wiesel, despite having written at length about the Holocaust, says, “There is no such thing as a literature of the Holocaust, nor can there be. The very expression is a contradiction in terms. Auschwitz negates any form of literature, as it defies all systems, all doctrines”—a view supported by Michael Wyschogrod: “I firmly believe that art is not appropriate to the Holocaust. Art takes the sting out of suffering.”

On the other hand, Alvin Rosenfeld makes the valid point that if writing about the Holocaust is a blasphemy, it is a more terrible blasphemy to remain silent. Only its preservation in literature will prevent the Holocaust from being relegated to the level of another historical event like the Battle of Hastings or the Repeal of the Corn Laws. Nevertheless, when the Holocaust becomes the theme of fiction, writers are presented with a problem never before confronted in the history of literature. As Rosenfeld asks: “For when fact itself surpasses fiction, what is there left for the novel and short story to do?”

This appears to be a insurmountable difficulty, until we accept that the aim of fictional writing about the Holocaust should not be one of mere description, of revisiting the death camps. This is done better by historians, eyewitnesses and survivors.

In discussing novels generally, Milan Kundera says in The Art of the Novel (1986):

A historian tells you about events that have taken place … A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything that man’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility.”

Where the Holocaust is concerned, we have hardly begun exploring the realm of human possibilities; history has presented us with the reality of the crime. We know the facts, they are the tip of an iceberg; it is what lies hidden that needs to be revealed. What we need from novels is revelation and enlightenment, an understanding of human nature. S. Lillian Kremer points out in Witness Through the Imagination (1989), “We may come closer to comprehension through the efforts of artists whose works incorporate and transcend representational reality, rather than through histories and eyewitness accounts.”

Here then lies the need for novels about the Holocaust. The re-telling of the facts is not required. There is a surplus of those to engage academic investigation for years to come as well as to entertain voyeurs of evil. Holocaust novels might be the only means by which we will absorb into our psyche the event which Kremer says “should be recognised as a turning point in world history, a catastrophe that altered fundamental assumptions about the human condition”.

The uniqueness of novels as a class of literature lies in their potential to create, develop and analyse human character; to present the reader with animas not to be found in history books or biographies. Unlike short stories that depend on action and movement, in the novel plot will be of secondary importance.

Novels that take the Holocaust as their theme might allow us to enter into the chameleon-like world of those ordinary people who participated in the crime, Goldhagen’s “men and women who collectively gave life to the inert institutional forms, who peopled the institutions of genocidal killing”.

Only the story teller, the spinner of tales, the weaver of dreams, is qualified to lead us into the inner recesses of the murderer’s subconscious mind, to probe its dark corners and speculate upon its tortuous, unreliable and unpredictable nature. By focusing upon the mind of the perpetrator, the novelist might dissect his motivations and explore the process by which he rationalises and justifies inhumane behaviour.

It is the sacred role of such a novelist to strip bare the soul of the torturer/murderer who delighted in his work in the factory of death, yet continued to shower affection upon his wife and children; who played Beethoven by night and executioner by day, who would laughingly shove children into a gas chamber yet weep at the death of a dog.

For the novelist to reveal the reality of the Holocaust, historical empiricism and scientific objectivity will be less important than perception and imagination. And before anyone counters this by saying that perception and imagination are the antithesis of fact, it should be reiterated that when the mind is incapable of absorbing the fact of the Holocaust, perception and imagination are the only tools available to us.

There is no certainty that a library of Holocaust novels will provide complete answers or satisfy our comprehension, not least because it is doubtful whether we possess a language appropriate to the event. Although we are in the process of developing a Holocaust language where words like Belsen, Auschwitz, death camp, gas chambers and crematoria assume special significance, can we ever hope to comprehend a language that is unrelated to us by way of experience?

Yet language is all we have. Despite the inadequacy of words we must at least try using them, bearing the hope that, as Alexander says, “literary works that are characterised by uncertainty, paralysis and ambivalence may provide a more adequate response to the Holocaust than works controlled by a tangible voice committed to the traditional transmutation of suffering into beauty and chaos into tragic significance.”

The unfortunate corollary of using the novel as a means to explore the Holocaust is that every novel that has ever been written, regardless of its message, becomes a medium of mass entertainment. Holocaust novels may also fall into this category and in so doing might trivialise the event.

In defence of novels however, it can be argued that all forms of writing, including eye-witness accounts, biographies and histories are also read by some people for their entertainment value. In reality, all art forms entertain but this is not a good enough reason to refrain from exploring the Holocaust through all available artistic media. One of the most moving works to come out of the Holocaust is the book I Never Saw Another Butterfly, a collection of children’s drawings and poems from Terezin concentration camp. It conveys more truth and understanding than many other account of the Holocaust.

In resurrecting the demons and archetypes who inspired, captivated and ultimately dehumanised, there is a possibility that the Holocaust novel could fulfil its profoundest role. With the artistry of a puppeteer, the writer, by manipulating, stretching and exposing the animus of the executioner, may allow us a glimpse into a looking glass wherein we see reflected, not only the minds of the guilty but possibly our own.

Holocaust novels, by challenging us to confront our own consciences, should compel us to ask the question whether, under similar circumstances, we would have acted differently. Until we undertake the terrible journey of self-examination and come to terms with our own reptilian brain centre, there is every possibility that history will repeat itself.

There might be a perceived danger that readers of Holocaust fiction might, even unintentionally, believe that the whole calamity was fiction. However, this has not been the case with novels about the two world wars, perhaps the best known being All Quiet on the Western Front. Holocaust novels will probably be treated similarly, except by a handful of readers who choose to deny reality.

Brian Wimborne has been a research editor for the Australian Dictionary of Biography for the last twenty years.

Bibliography

343. S. Eliot, “Religion and Literature,” in Selected Essays: New Edition. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950: 343.

Wolf Mankowicz, Preface to A Treasury of Yiddish Stories. Irving Howe & Eliezer Greenberg (Eds.). Andre Deutsch, 1955: v.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Little, Brown and Co., 1996: 6.

Stanley Milgram, Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1963, 67: 371-378.

Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective, Seattle, 1978: 45.

Lionel Trilling, “Art and Fortune,” in The Liberal Imagination. Viking, 1950: 265.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3 vols., Harcourt, Brace and World, 1951, 3:142.

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980: 3.

Edward Alexander, The Resonance of Dust, Ohio State Univ. Press, 1979: xvii.

Elie Wiesel. “Jewish Values in the Post-Holocaust Future: A Symposium,” Judaism 16, Summer 1967: 285.

Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time, trans. Steven Donadio. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968: 190

T.W. Adorno, “Engagement”, Noten zur Literatur III, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1965: 109-135.

Elie Wiesel, “For Some Measure of Humility,” Sh’ma 5/100, October,    31, 1975: 314.

Michael Wyschogrod, “Some Theological Reflections on the Holocaust,” Response 25, Spring 1975: 68.

Alvin H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying. Indiana Univ. Press, 1980: 14.

Milan Kundera, “Dialogue on the Art of the Novel,” The Art of the Novel, Faber & Faber, 1988: 42.

8. Lillian Kremer, Witness Through the Imagination, Wayne State Univ. Press, 1989: 8.