Literature and the Holocaust
Teaching the Representations of the Unthinkable

BY LEONARD ORR

ALTHOUGH I HAD been there twice before, the dark, almost expressionistically lit interior of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) managed always to be disorienting and upsetting. The vast, red-brown brick walls and the inexplicable networks of pipes and exposed steel beams recall prison walls or the enclosed ghetto; the interior lights are reminiscent of the electric fences that surrounded Auschwitz. Most disturbingly, the massive steel doors remind the visitor of the ovens in the death camps. Behind one of those massive doors in June 2003, I participated with 19 other scholars in an intensive two-week-long Seminar on Literature and the Holocaust in the USHMM’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

Each day was difficult, exhausting, exciting, eye opening, depressing, and intellectually thrilling. The leader of the seminar was Geoffrey Hartman, professor emeritus from Yale University, author of many books ranging in area from British Romanticism to critical theory to the Holocaust.

Most of the scholars associated with the center are historians, and literature was only very recently added into their programs; our group was the first focusing on the topic. Every day we studied certain texts closely, going line by line and discussing the issues, texts, translations, and techniques employed to represent the horrific events that took place. We began with issues of historiography, memory, and language, using numerous literary texts (Charlotte Delbo, Czeslaw Milosz, Ingeborg Bachmann) and theoretical works, such as Theodor Adorno’s famous statement about the end of poetry after Auschwitz (in his Negative Dialectics) or Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster. That was just the first day! In the course of the two weeks, we ranged through so many works dealing with issues of representability and universality, of genre and authorial connection with the Shoah, of bearing witness in texts and other forms of testimony, of trauma and the impact of the events on memory, second-generation writers, the Holocaust in collective memory and public representations, desensitization, and mourning and melancholy.

I returned to the Tri-Cities physically and emotionally exhausted, having bought enough books to fill three shelves, with a suitcase full of handouts and with notebooks of questions and ideas.