Representing the Holocaust in Children's Literature

Lydia Kokkola

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135354114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Writing about the Holocaust and writing for young readers evoke two quite separate sets of concerns which are not always mutually compatible. The first half of Representing the Holocaust focuses on how literary material can present historically verifiable material. The second half examines how such materials will be perceived by young readers; whether they will be able to determine any boundaries between fictionality and factuality, and what motivates young readers to keep reading. The work concludes by placing the study in the context of Holocaust education.

1
Non-representation: The Voice of Silence

How can a Jew speak of the Shoah in the language of his murderers? How can he speak of it in any other language? How can he speak of it at all?

GEORGE STEINER¹

It may seem perverse to feel the need to pause and consider exactly what the role of writing has upon representations of the Holocaust—an evasion of the appalling historical reality. Focusing on the act of representation rather than the subject matter creates a necessary distance for understanding what is communicated. Critics of historical novels need to examine the means by which communication takes place in order to avoid inadvertent misrepresentations of the events under discussion. Wittgenstein claimed that the limits of our world are the limits of our language, that is, that we cannot think beyond the limits of our language. If this is the case, then we face a very fundamental problem when trying to refer to the Holocaust in words, and at this point I have not yet concerned myself with additional difficulties implied when the recipient of these words is a young child. The basic matter that I discuss, children’s fiction, mainly consists of written words. The act of writing must take all these extreme considerations into account in order to forge an appropriate path between speech and silence.

The Holocaust defies the use of metaphor. We can say “I’m starving” when it has been four hours since we last ate a decent meal. We can say “I’m exhausted” when our child woke us up in the middle of the night. We can say “I’m afraid” when we mean that we are slightly sorry. This use of hyperbole in daily language undermines our ability to communicate when the circumstances we describe are not hyperbolic. When referring to literal starvation, exhaustion, and fear, the use of these terms in a non–metaphoric sense is hard for readers to grasp; the signified lies beyond the limits of our experience. Even more abstract metaphors are not effective because they are frequently used in moderate contexts, which can reduce their power and/or carry unfortunate overtones. For instance, the camps are often referred to as “hell.” At first, this term seems satisfactory: it lies totally beyond human experience and is therefore beyond menial comparisons in a way that hunger and starvation are not. However, “hell” can be used as mild expletive, in much the same way as “damn” with its neutralised common meaning. Even if one does think of hell in its religious sense, the term is not appropriate: hell is a place intended for the punishment of sins and so this metaphor inadvertently places blame on the victims.

Observations of the inadequacy of language to describe, confront and contain the Holocaust has led a number of very serious critics, most notably George Steiner, to suggest that silence is the only appropriate response. By 1988, he was to retract this claim referring to it as a “suicidal” option.² The alternative of silence is, as Robert Leventhal observes, “to simply relegate the Holocaust to oblivion, to rob it of any articulation and thereby to continue, by other means, what the Nazi’s sought to do in the first place.”³ For in silence we become complicit with the oppressor, we hush up the past. Somehow we must challenge the problematics of speaking the unspeakable. Silence offers future generations an empty book likely to be filled with, at best unreliable details, at worst anti-Semitism.

Since Steiner made his radical statement in the late 1960s, a plethora of research has been conducted on ways in which language can be used to represent the Holocaust.⁴ Only recently has this discussion begun to be applied to the study of Holocaust literature for children. In this chapter, I briefly review the central debates concerning the representation of the Holocaust in writing. Having argued for the importance of literature for children, I examine the ways in which Holocaust literature addresses readers through silence. Leona Toker’s claim that “the absence of a message is a message in its own right” is taken as the starting point for a discussion of the rhetoric of silence.⁵

Silence, Nonfiction, and Literature

Until very recently, discussions of writing about the Holocaust could be crudely divided into three basic camps: those who argue that silence is the only appropriate response, those who argue that the facts should speak for themselves and therefore advocate nonfiction, and those who argue that fiction is the best means of communicating with non–witnesses. A brief quotation from an advocate of each position quickly reveals that it is quite possible to resonate to the spirit of each of these apparently contradictory positions simultaneously.

Arguing for nonfiction as the only appropriate media for writing about the Holocaust, Berel Lang states:

the Holocaust cannot be represented by the usual poetic of fictional devices that would, if they worked as they usually do, “epitomize” it, exhibit features by which the reader might more fully imagine or realize it. At best, the writer would belabor the obvious: what artifice could more fully “realize” the facts of the Holocaust? At worst, what he wrote would fail even to match the intensity of those facts.⁶

The inadequacy of language to describe, confront, and contain the Holocaust has led other critics to suggest that silence is the only appropriate response. In the epigraph to this chapter, I quoted Steiner as asking, “How can a Jew speak of the Shoah in the language of his murderers? How can he speak of it in any other language? How can he speak of it at all?” Agreeing with Steiner’s sentiment that language is not adequate to the task, Irving Howe states that “the canniest [Holocaust] writers keep a wary distance. They know or sense that their subject cannot be met full face. It must be taken at a tangent, with extreme wariness, through strategies of indirection and circuitous narratives that leave untouched the central horror—that leave it untouched but always invoke or evoke it as hovering shadow.”⁷

Between them, Lang, Steiner, and Howe present very differing views as to how one should approach the Holocaust in writing. Despite the gross disagreements at the specific level, it is, however, possible for the open-minded critic to weave a thread between these contradictions. My aim has been to respond to the spirit of the various points of discussion. Thus, although the logical conclusion to be drawn from many of the critics I discuss are either that one should not write fiction at all or that one should be silent, I have tried to examine the possibility that Holocaust literature for children still can respond to the spirit of their demands.

In the course of this exploration, I seem to come close to what may be a new line of investigation. Ernestine Schlant’s study, The Language of Silence, starts from the premise that “literature as the seismograph of a people’s moral positions… reveals even where it is silent; its blind spots and absences speak a language stripped of conscious agendas.”⁸ Her study suggests that the language of silence is used as a means of avoiding talking about the Holocaust. While I do not deny this is very often the case, my aim is to show how silence may also be a communicative act. So while we agree that literature can be marked by “absence and silence contoured by language. Yet this silence is not a monolithic emptiness,” it can be a means of suppressing, or revealing, the story of the Holocaust.⁹

I will start with the most extreme position: George Steiner’s claim that language was so abused by the Nazis that it has lost the power to communicate. Thus silence is the only possible response to the Holocaust.

The Death of Language

I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.

(SAMUEL BECKETT, ENDGAME)

The decision to speak or be silent in the face of the Holocaust is fraught with pain and difficulty. If one chooses to speak, one has to take on critics like Theodore Adorno who warned: “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch (Writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric).”¹⁰ Adorno’s much debated statement claims that the creation of an aesthetic response, by implication a pleasurable experience, is a further form of victim abuse. He also claims that the representation of an horrific event, when it draws on literary skills, achieves a certain graphic power which can serve to domesticate the power of the horrific by rendering it familiar. The attractiveness of even a weak literary form, Adorno suggests, reduces the power of the message. Any aesthetic appreciation, Adorno claims, makes voyeuristic pleasure possible and, therefore, adds further injustice to the victims’ suffering. For Adorno, aesthetic responses are so tightly connected to pleasure that artistic representations of the Holocaust inevitably buy into and feed from what Howe refers to as “voyeuristic sadomasochism.”¹¹

If writing is unacceptable, then the alternative is silence. This argument was put forward most forcefully by George Steiner in his essay collection, Language and Silence. In this early work, Steiner argued that the events that took place in Auschwitz are literally unspeakable for two main reasons. First, the Nazi’s used and abused language to such an extent that it is no longer a reliable, trustworthy tool for communication. Indeed, he went so far as to claim that the effort of containing the horrors of the Holocaust had killed the German language.

Languages have great reserves of life. They can absorb masses of hysteria, illiteracy and cheapness. … But there comes a breaking point. Use a language to conceive, organize, and justify Belsen; use it to make out specifications for gas ovens; use it to dehumanize man during twelve years of calculated bestiality. Something will happen to it. … The language will no longer grow and freshen. … It has in it no flame of life.¹²

Steiner’s second reason for claiming that the Shoah is unspeakable is simply that the atrocities themselves are too large to be contained within the simple reference points of human language. As already noted, even powerful words, such as “horror,” “fear,” and “murder” are not sufficient for describing what took place. In the words of Robert Leventhal, “The atrocities committed by the Nazi regime … transcend any words we could use to characterize them. Their barbarity goes beyond the referential and representational capacity of language.”^12a Better then, suggested Steiner in his essay first written in 1959, not to speak. Better to remain silent than to attempt to speak the unspeakable.

By 1988 and the publication of Writing and the Holocaust, a collection of papers edited by Berel Lang, Steiner’s views had shifted. In “The Long Life of Metaphor: An Approach to the ‘Shoah’,” Steiner steps back from his earlier extremist position to argue that “the only language in which anything intelligible, anything responsible, about the Shoah can be attempted is German.”¹³ Steiner’s reasoning behind this shift in position is that German has always been the main language of anti-Semitism. Starting from the pamphlets of Martin Luther in the early 1540s, Steiner traces the roots of the main anti–Semitic ideologists through to the use of language to create specifications for gas ovens.

Steiner’s shift may have been affected by a similar shift in Adorno’s views. Although far less widely quoted than his plea for no poetry, by 1966 Adorno had also modified his views: “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream, hence it may have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz.”¹⁴ Adorno’s and Steiner’s works have inspired a great deal of debate. Although most critics respond negatively to their calls for silence on the grounds that it would lead to forgetting, one can also sense that many resonate to the spirit of their arguments. Language does seem inadequate to the task of discussing the Holocaust. When everyday language is used, there is a very real fear that the events could be normalized to the point at which they would become too familiar.

In his counter-response to Steiner’s claims, Leventhal describes Steiner’s discourse as “a discourse of mourning” and asks whether the destruction of German is a proper focus for such mourning. Leventhal claims that a better focus for mourning would be the loss of the languages of the European Jews rather than the loss of the perpetrator’s language. Saul Friedländer also asks for greater classification when he states that Steiner’s claims are imprecise and that Steiner should distinguish between the damage done to the German language and the damage done to language in general.

In his essay “Language and Genocide”, Berel Lang concretizes the debate between Friedländer and Steiner with his own materials and discussion, but surprisingly makes no reference to either critic.¹⁵ Lang traces specific abuses of the German language under Nazi influence that resulted in what Steiner refers to as its death. A single example will suffice to give a sense of the import of Lang’s central argument.

One of the key terms in Holocaust terminology is, of course, Endlösung or final solution. Prior to the adoption of this term, other related expressions and words had been considered. Lang specifically mentions Endziel (final goal), Gesamtlösung (total solution) and Endgültige Lösung (conclusive solution); terms that were all used by important Nazi officials before the Endlösung was settled upon as the ideal expression.¹⁶ The choice of Lösung (solution) is powerful rhetorical strategy since it assumes the existence of a question or problem. The general reference to both the Jewish and Gypsy “problem” and “question” reinforced the notion that a solution or answer was needed. Ziel (goal) also has positive overtones, but it is more vague in the sense that it does not immediately make it clear whether the goal is obtainable. Lösung (solution) indicates something that is feasible. When the prefix End (final) is added, the term becomes even more powerful. First, it indicates that other possible solutions have been suggested but that this solution is the one that will work. Second, it has the positive implication that no further solutions will be required. Lang summarizes this argument by stating:

Endlösung may seem even more benign a concept than its partial root Lösung. Solutions are responses to problems which, by definition, are troublesome, hindering, matters which should be overcome or solved. … Given the reasonable corollary, moreover, that if a problem is to be solved, it is best solved once and for all, an Endlösung is desirable in a way that provisional or incomplete solutions are not.¹⁷

Lang notes that the positive associations of the term Endlösung work effectively regardless of whether or not the hearer is aware of how the word has been abused. For those who did not know the denotation of the term, its internal structure hinted at a positive process. For those who did know what it meant, the term was still positive since it simultaneously affirms and obscures the referent. Endlösung focuses on the goal rather than the means.

The brazen disparity between the positive implications of a term like Endlösung and the actions to which it refers is representative of the abuse carried out on language during the course of the Holocaust. Many other examples can be found amongst the terms developed during the Holocaust. Lang provides a lengthy list of specialist terms used to describe murder or execution: Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), Entsprechend behandelt (treated appropriately), Aussiedlung (evacuation), Umsiedlung (resettlement), Auflockerung (thinning out), Befriedungsaktion (pacification), Ausschaltung (removal), Säuberung (cleansing), Sicherheitspolizeilich durch-gearbeitet (worked through or directed in a security police manner) and Abwanderung (having-been-migrated).¹⁸ This list does not include any of the relabeling that went on insid...