Beyond the Question of Authenticity: Witness and Testimony in the Fragments Controversy

PMLA ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 116 (5) ◽  
pp. 1302-1315
Author(s):  
Michael Bernard-Donals
Keyword(s):  
Historical Evidence ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Object Lesson

The publication of Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments in 1995 and the subsequent controversy over its authenticity can be seen as an object lesson in the vexed relation of history and memory. The book's status as an authentic memoir of the Holocaust has been impeached, yet Fragments may nonetheless be a useful vehicle for memory Cathy Caruth's and Shoshana Felman's work on trauma and on its relation to testimony indicates that testimony bears at best a tenuous relation to the events that form its core, particularly when the events are traumatic. An examination of Wilkomirski's language, read alongside (other) survivor testimony, suggests that Fragments may testify to a disaster other than the Holocaust. This conclusion, however, has controversial implications: that we need to reevaluate seriously how we treat testimony as historical evidence, including testimony of the Holocaust, and that the injunctions attached to Holocaust memory—never forget, never again—may be difficult if not impossible to heed.

Beyond the Question of Authenticity: Witness and Testimony in the Fragments Controversy

PMLA ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 116 (5) ◽  
pp. 1302-1315
Author(s):  
Michael Bernard-Donals
Keyword(s):  
Historical Evidence ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Object Lesson

The publication of Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments in 1995 and the subsequent controversy over its authenticity can be seen as an object lesson in the vexed relation of history and memory. The book's status as an authentic memoir of the Holocaust has been impeached, yet Fragments may nonetheless be a useful vehicle for memory Cathy Caruth's and Shoshana Felman's work on trauma and on its relation to testimony indicates that testimony bears at best a tenuous relation to the events that form its core, particularly when the events are traumatic. An examination of Wilkomirski's language, read alongside (other) survivor testimony, suggests that Fragments may testify to a disaster other than the Holocaust. This conclusion, however, has controversial implications: that we need to reevaluate seriously how we treat testimony as historical evidence, including testimony of the Holocaust, and that the injunctions attached to Holocaust memory—never forget, never again—may be difficult if not impossible to heed.

scholarly journals Memory images: Holocaust memory in Balkan cinema(s)

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (32) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nevena Daković
Keyword(s):  
Master Narrative ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Future ◽  
Hybrid Format ◽  
Manifold Effect

The aim of this paper is to analyse the shift of the representational and narrative paradigms of Holocaust memory in the Balkan films that belong to two genres – of melodrama and historicalfiction. The hybrid format positons the Holocaust (hi)stories – already caught between forgetting and remembrance – on the unstable ground between trauma and nostalgia; between history and memory; or facts and fiction. The “regained visibility of the Holocaust grant us access” to Balkan past and present and oblige us to investigate the convergence of the history and the memory into Holocaust master narrative of the Holocaust.“Bringing the dark past to light” in cinema has manifold effect. First, the Balkan wave of Holocaustfilms, with its mixed generic performances, offers new answers to the traditional issues of, both, the ethics of memory and the ethics of representation. Second, the analysis of five films reveals that the trauma from the past – resisting the closure – has the potential to powerfully resonate in the present day political crises. Re-dressing the trauma of the past, the films present the future violence while fulfilling “the Holocaust dictum ‘never forget’”. Eventually, new representational paradigm gives consistency to the Balkan (hi)stories of the past and coherence to the identity in the present.

History and Memory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alon Confino
Keyword(s):  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Methodological Approaches

This chapter describes how memory has shaped the academic discipline of history. In the past two decades or so, ‘memory’ as a category to analyze and understand the relation of human beings to their past has become a nearly ubiquitous concept. Triggered jointly by the general crisis of representationalism and by a specific historical experience—the Holocaust—‘memory’ has replaced for some scholars a rather linear and monodimensional concept of ‘society’. Whereas in the past, memory was considered to be subjective and unreliable, it has now moved to centre-stage: it is in individual and collective memory that the past remains present in the contemporary agent. Memory, captured in methodological approaches such as oral history, also foregrounds the historical experience of ordinary people and thus carries the potential to counterbalance official, state-focused, and politically legitimate historical narratives, as well as those more broadly sanctioned by the academic enterprise.

Grandparents Reveal Their Secrets: A New Holocaust Narrative for the Young ‘Third Generation’ in Israel

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yael Darr
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Third Generation ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Safe Distance ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
Very Young Children ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
New Type

Since the 1990s, a new type of Holocaust story has been emerging in Israeli children's literature. This new narrative is directed towards very young children, from preschool to the first years of elementary school, and its official goal is to instil in them an authentic ‘first Holocaust memory’. This essay presents the literary characteristics of this new Holocaust narrative for children and its master narrative. It brings into light a new profile of both writers and readers. The writers were young children during the Holocaust, and first chose to tell their stories from the safe distance of three generations. The readers are their grand-children and their grand-children's peers, who are assigned an essential role as listeners. These generational roles – the roles of a First Generation of writers and of a Third Generation of readers – are intrinsically familial ones. As such, they mark a significant change in the profile of yet another important figure in the Israeli intergenerational Holocaust discourse, the agent of the Holocaust story for children. Due to the new literary initiatives, the task of providing young children with a ‘first Holocaust memory’ is transferred from the educational authority, where it used to reside, to the domestic sphere.

scholarly journals On Becoming a Non-Jewish Holocaust Writer: Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Rachel F. Brenner
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
Family Level ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Origins

To appraise Martel’s non-Jewish perspective of Holocaust thematic, it is important to assess it in the context of the Jewish relations with the Holocaust. Even though the Jewish claim to the uniqueness of the Holocaust has been disputed since the end of the war especially in Eastern Europe, the Jewish response determined to a large extent the reception of the disaster on the global scene. On a family level, the children of survivors have identified themselves as the legitimate heirs of the unknowable experience of their parents. On a collective level, the decree of Jewish annihilation constructed a Jewish identity that imposed an obligation to keep the Holocaust memory in the consciousness of the world. Martel proposes to supersede the history of the Holocaust with a story which would downplay the Jewish filiation with the Holocaust, elicit an affiliative response to the event of the non-Jewish writer and consequently integrate it into the memory of humanity at large. However, the Holocaust theme of Beatrice and Virgil refuses to assimilate within the general memory of humanity; rather, the consciousness of the event, which pervades the post-Holocaust world, insists on its constant presence. The omnipresence of the Holocaust blurs the distinctions between the filiative (Jewish) and affiliative (non-Jewish) attitudes toward the Jewish tragedy, gripping the writer in its transcendent horror. Disregarding his ethnic or religious origins, the Holocaust takes over the writer’s personal life and determines his story.

Fragments of the Holocaust

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Duindam
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Museum Studies ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
World War ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
Holocaust Memorial ◽  
Memorial Museum ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
A Site

Why do we attach so much value to sites of Holocaust memory, if all we ever encounter are fragments of a past that can never be fully comprehended? David Duindam examines how the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a former theater in Amsterdam used for the registration and deportation of nearly 50,000 Jews, fell into disrepair after World War II before it became the first Holocaust memorial museum of the Netherlands. Fragments of the Holocaust: The Amsterdam Hollandsche Schouwburg as a Site of Memory combines a detailed historical study of the postwar period of this site with a critical analysis of its contemporary presentation by placing it within international debates concerning memory, emotionally fraught heritage and museum studies. A case is made for the continued importance of the Hollandsche Schouwburg and other comparable sites, arguing that these will remain important in the future as indexical fragments where new generations can engage with the memory of the Holocaust on a personal and affective level.

Regarding the Pain of Women: Questions of Gender and the Arts of Holocaust Memory

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1778-1786 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Young
Keyword(s):  
The Public ◽  
War Photography ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Critical Literature

My Title, a variation on Susan Sontag's regarding the pain of others, is meant as an homage to sontag and as an extension of her searing critique of war photography and its reflexive objectification of suffering, its conversion of victims into objets d'art. But why, in particular, the pain of women Holocaust victims here? Because we have finally begun to amass a large and profound critical literature on gender and the Holocaust, which, alongside Sontag's work on photography, might help us look at how and why the public gaze of photographers, curators, historians, and museumgoers continues to turn women into objects of memory, idealized casts of perfect suffering and victimization, and even emblems of larger Jewish suffering during the Holocaust.

scholarly journals The reconfiguration of the European Archive in contemporary German-Jewish migrant-literature

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-54
Author(s):  
Jessica Ortner
Keyword(s):  
European Archive ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Migrant Literature ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
Political Concern ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Mass Shooting ◽  
History Of ◽  
German Jewish

A considerable number of Eastern European migrant authors of Jewish origin are currently lifting Holocaust memory to a new level. Writing in German about events taking place in remote areas of the world, they expand the German framework of memory from a national to a transnational one. By partaking in reconsidering what is ‘vital for a shared remembering’ of Europe, this branch of writing reflects the European Union’s political concern for integrating the memories of the socialistic regimes in European history writing without relativising the Holocaust. In Vielleicht Esther, Katja Petrowskaja consults various national and private archives in order to recount the history of the mass shooting of over 30,000 Ukrainian Jews at Babij Jar – a canyon near Kiev. Thus, she ‘carries’ a marginalised event of the Holocaust into the German framework of memory and uncovers the layers of amnesia that have not only concealed the event amongst the Soviet public but also distorted and for ever made inaccessible her family’s past.

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