The essay explores Primo Levi's description of the Buna tower in If This is a Man as his indirect Midrashic commentary on the Tower of Babel. It shows how the Midrash helps to bridge between the two texts, with Primo Levi's memoir both drawing on and reinterpreting the Biblical story.

On the bases of discussions of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, as well as of Charlotte Delbo’s, Jean Améry’s, and Primo Levi’s memoirs, Fred Wander’s The Seventh Well, John Felstiner’s translation of Celan’s Todesfuge, and Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader, this paper presents a model for reading the Holocaust structured around the ideas of “illiteracy” and “aphasia,” the opportunity to transform linguistic disability into a means of access to what seems “beyond the word.” Rather than precluding insight, verbal insufficiency serves as a form of “negative capability,” the potential to dwell in a space with no complete answers, no security, respecting the terms upon which victims of the event had to read their own experience. Using specifically language-related terms emphasizes the difference between knowing about an event through representation and knowledge from direct personal exposure, not to detract from the limits of understanding outlined by trauma theory but to decouple the experience of trauma itself from reading about it. Our belatedness, reading “after Auschwitz,” carries the ethical obligation to recognize the distinction between then and now, between illiteracy as inability to derive meaning from an event without context and a willful blindness that chooses to deny, between aphasia from immediate injury and aphasia from posthumous grief. The Nazi genocide of the Jews leaves a legacy of semantic abuse, yet the voice of the witness also persists, allowing us to turn linguistic breakdown into insight. To read with insightful illiteracy, to recognize our aphasic limitations, is not merely a strategy for coming to terms with the Holocaust but an ethical necessity.

There is a basic tension between eyewitness narratives and archival records (which have attracted the attention for many artists and intellectuals in the last decade or two). Archival material bears the imprint of the bureaucratic, of that which has been institutionally preserved. It gives us traces of the dead, evidence of the past that has been recorded but not (yet) processed; it exists as a mnemonic device, as that which awaits the coming of the researcher to be brought back to life. The eyewitness narrative, on the other hand, is intensely personal, even if also collective. The opposition between these two modes of representation and of memory itself has a long history. In “Plato’s Pharmacy” Jacques Derrida stages and deconstructs the opposition between memory and re- and com-memoration, between the living truth and the archive.  More recently, Giorgio Agamben, writing about the new Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, analyzes the differences between the “unforgettable” and that which can be recalled to memory and archived.

This paper  examines the ways in which the dynamic relations between the living and the dead, the private and the public, the fragment and the whole, the personal and the institutional, and the autobiographical and the historical, inform and complicate -- in different ways -- both the eyewitness narrative and the archive. The discussion will focus on the Memorial at Hohenschönhausen to the East German victims of the Stasi (at the site of the former interrogation center and prison, where the tours are all conducted by former inmates), and the Stasi Museum at the site of the former Stasi headquarters, with its miles of archival files.

It is often assumed that Testimony and Autobiography are clearly distinct genres. On this view Testimony conveys eye-witness reports of particular tragic events, whether momentary or of longer duration (e.g. years in a concentration camp), while Autobiography is seen as more chronologically extended and more introspective. However, since many Holocaust narratives incorporate “testimony” into a larger life-narrative which, among other things, traces the psychological effects of trauma in later years, it seems reasonable to see Testimony, at least in some instances, as an aspect of Autobiography. As always, such generic markers should be seen as heuristic indicators, not as inflexible taxonomic categories. Most serious writers agentially deploy, develop and combine generic possibilities. One such writer is Jacob G. Rosenberg, Australia’s finest Jewish autobiographer and a world class figure in Holocaust writing. Born into a Bundist family in Lodz in 1922, Rosenberg is the author of two award-winning autobiographical volumes, East of Time (2005) and Sunrise West (2007), that narrate his life in the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and Ebensee, and Australia. His is a hybrid art fusing scriptural and folk materials with influences from Yiddish literature and Western modernity. His signature technique -- the imaginatively charged vignette -- is equally attuned to the description of horror and of redemptive, sometimes visionary, enchantment. Though the psychological dimension of his writing owes more to Yiddish sources than to Freudian modernity, his tracing of trauma’s aftermath down the years constitutes full-blown autobiographical writing which powerfully incorporates and extends the act of testimony. Rosenberg writes: “Once you have been tortured, you are forever tortured.”

Part of the project of reweaving the threads of the history of the Third Reich, the essay discusses the complex relation between the testimony of the victims and their body as an epistemic source of the witnessing. On a theoretical bases constructed with the help of Shoah memoirs – by Primo Levi, Jean Améry, Jorge Semprun, Robert Antelme, and others, the paper challenges the notion of the witness as a speaker, a narrator; instead, it treats the kind of victim that since Auschwitz has been known as “a Muselmann” as an integral witness. It is the body of the survivor that constitutes integral testimony; it fills a testimonial lacuna. The presence of the Muselmann is testifiable, and it can replace the memoir by the body as the repository of the event. When the body translates into the corpus of writing, survivor testimony is perceived as incomplete so long as the Muselmann is perceived as the other. The lacuna in survivor narratives is testimony from inside the experience of the Muselmann.

The article explores the complex relations between scholars and witnesses of war, taking as a test-case Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The article defines two types of witnesses, which lay claim to two distinct types of authority: eyewitnesses, who lay claim to the factual authority gained from the objective observation of events; and flesh-witnesses, who lay claim to the experiential authority gained from having personally undergone certain experiences.

Eyewitnesses are a valuable and relatively docile source of scholarly information, providing scholars with data about war without challenging the scholars’ ability to process this data. The authority of eyewitnesses thereby backs up the authority of scholars. In contrast, flesh-witnesses often challenge the ability of scholars to understand the experience of war. They thereby undermine the authority of scholars, and set themselves up as an alternative and superior authority on war.

The leaders of the Jewish police in the Kovno ghetto, a controversial public institution, initiated a project of writing the history of the Jewish police. Their purpose was to leave testimonies and records of the police in the ghetto, and to convey their perspective on the events. The writers were aware of their limitations – their subjectivity and closeness to the events. However, they had an urge to present a narrative describing their organization -- not as memoirs or diaries of individual policemen but as a Geschichte of their unit for future generations. This paper offers an analysis of one episode in this “History” – viz. of the text and the contexts of the unusual swearing-in ceremony that was held at a relative late point in the history of the ghetto police and that in the “History” is not presented in the chronologically appropriate place – commenting both on the possible meaning of the event and on the manner of its representation.

June 2009: Dalia Ofer, Professor Emerita of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Max and Rita Haber Professor of Holocaust and East European studies, Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry), is the author and editor of several books, including the Jewish Book Award-winning Escaping the Holocaust: Illegal Immigration to the Land of Israel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) and Women in the Holocaust (co-edited with Lenore J. Weitzman, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), as well as of numerous articles in Holocaust studies.

The article deals with records of thaumaturgic cures, especially a series of miracle cures taking place within an enclosed community of Colettine nuns in fifteenth-century Ghent. These miracles, all performed by the local founder and saint, Colette Boëllet, consisted in curing several nuns from acute and chronic illnesses. The pain of these illnesses is described in a superlatively extravagant mode, and the record, made by an external notary, is evidence of a “competition in suffering” among the nuns, with harmony restored through the common written testimony.

Literary undertakings of the Faust legend have traditionally associated the fate of the overreacher with a thematized fragmentation. On the level of plot, Faust is torn limb from limb or threatened to be thus handled by a devilish cohort; stylistically, the tight drama that unfolds in the protagonist’s study spirals into a disjointed account of royal courts and sidekick pranks. In John Banville’s Mefisto this fragmentation is articulated in intertextual links that open up the text to a rich anteriority. Signification is consequently produced both horizontally and vertically, both inside and outside the novel. This paper traces the antecedents of the Faustian intertexts present in the novel and test the effects of such accumulation on the practice of hermeneutic deciphering. It shows that Banville’s intertextuality itself functions as a Mephistophilian figure, a playful abundance that creates an obstacle for interpretation. Such a stylized chaos does not allow for a teleological reshuffling or re-ordering of the text into a meaningful and cohesive pattern. The reader, then, is enjoined not to re-order the text but to performatively re-enact it, a creative process that will have us thinking not inside but outside the hermeneutic circle.

If literary theory recently has undergone a fundamental change, the question arises: is it possible that the very nature of theory has itself changed?  This paper argues that Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” provides some strategies that allow us to take up this question. In order to make this clear, one must first bear in mind that Benjamin’s essay implies a new understanding of literary theory by stating that a general theory of understanding has to be designed by using the form of a translation theory that (in contrast to a simple translation) specifies the conditions that must be filled in order for the utterances of one’s own language to be seen as synonymous with those of a foreign language. Thus, like Donald Davidson after him, Benjamin had come to the conclusion that translation must be fused with the interpretational theory of translation in order to avoid infinite regresses. This, however, ultimately means that literary theory is — as pure or true language — the virtual goal, and not the precondition of any cognition that arises from the perspective of literary studies.

This paper discusses the aesthetic and social implications of enacted eyewitness accounts. For Brecht, the principles of eyewitness performance served as a “basic model” for contemporary epic theater as a performed critique of social life, with the “Street Scene” (1940) and a camp scene (1939/40) as the paradigmatic sites of eyewitness acts. With Brecht and Smith, who superimposes these sites in her multi-media work on the Brooklyn Crown Heights Race Riots in 1991 (1992-94), the theatricality of eyewitness accounts, their “uneasy” aesthetics and acting technique, becomes crucial to understanding the present moment in culture.  Concomitantly, enacted eyewitness accounts politicize and de-psychologize our understanding of their scenes. They are not about identity – what we are – but about personhood, about how we are as social creatures, in legal, aesthetic, and material terms.

This paper examines the climactic scene in Ian McEwan’s novel 2005 Saturday in which the protagonist's pregnant poet daughter fends off a home invasion by reciting Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” My broader goal is to demonstrate that McEwan constructs not a nostalgic longing for a Victorian past, but rather a moment of neo-Victorianism: one that turns to Victorian reflections upon domestic and foreign politics, history, and the literary form in order to make meaning in a contemporary literary or cultural text.   The essay explores the phenomenologies (and politics) of reading and re-reading, and works toward the idea that certain acts of postmodernist re-reading lead to a kind of reflection on literary influence that originates (at least for McEwan) with nineteenth-century literature. McEwan’s scene of the reading and rereading of “Dover Beach” in Saturday presents the Arnold poem as an always already reread text — in the sense both that it is a text that rereads itself (containing within the space of the poem oppositional readings of the self and the community), and that it is a text that rereads other, prior texts.