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Opacity and Light The Anecdote in Accounts of the Concentration Camps
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
Writing about testimonies from the concentration camps poses a fundamental problem to those who undertake this task, for one cannot lightly broach the still-living history of the Nazi camps. Auschwitz “is not a subject for a colloquium” or, at least, not a subject like others. For the deportees themselves, speaking up is not easy. In whose name can they speak, in the name of what can they remember, how can they say it and to whom? Such are the first questions which arise like so many obstacles to communication. How to express the inexpressible? Such is the problem lying at the heart of all the testimonies, inasmuch as their credibility but also their possibility of existing depend on it. As Yves Reuter points out, the question of form appears in its most crucial aspect here:
Neither history nor textual theory can overlook the concentration camp testimonies, extreme discourses of an extreme experience. To be concerned with form is not at all secondary. The obsessive “how to say it” of the accounts in this case seems of capital importance to me.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © 1993 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
Notes
1. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Pardonner, Paris, Editions du Seuil 1986, p. 34, cited by Yves Reuter, “L'anecdote dans les témoignages concentrationnaires,” L'anecdote (Actes du Colloque de Clermont-Ferrand, 1988), Assn. of publications of the Faculté de lettres et sciences humaines of Clermont-Ferrand, 1990, p.p. 109-120, cit. p. 109.
2. Ibid.
3. Robert Antelme, L'Espece humaine, Paris: Gallimard, 1957, Second edition, p. 9.
4. Reuter, op.cit., p. 110. This is not to say that accounts are impossible, but that the intrinsic difficulty of these testimonies makes certain strategies of communica tion all the more necessary.
5. Reuter, op.cit., p. 110.
6. Ibid.
7. Reuter, op. cit., p. 113.
8. Joel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction,” in H. Aram Veeser (editor), The New Historicism, London: Routledge, 1989, pp. 49-76.
9. The affirmation of the distancing of experience in favor of information is noth ing new. In his essay on “The narrator,” Walter Benjamin states: “One of the rea sons for this loss is clear: the the gradient of experience has diminished; and it appears even to be tending toward zero. It is enough, each morning, to glance at a newspaper to ascertain that from the day before the course of experience has sunk even lower [… ] An evolution began with the World War and since then this process has not ceased to accelerate. Did we not note after the Armistice that the fighters returned from the front mute, not richer but poorer in communicable expe rience ? What one was to read later in the mass of war books had nothing in com mon with this experience, which was passed by word of mouth.” (Essais 2, 1935-1949, Paris: Denoël, p. 56) Information and experience form two opposed communicational modes according to Benjamin: information would be the near rather than the far, the true more than the authorized, the “comprehensible in and of itself” (an und für sich verständlich), the plausible exactitude without surprises, the event explained in its newness rather than “gathered” during the long term in which it participates.
10. Buchenwald, Ein Konzentrationslager, Frankfurt-am-Main: Röderberg-Verlag, 1984; Auschwitz, Geschichte und Wirklichkeit des Vernichtungslagers, Hambourg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch, 1978.
11. Jean Baumel, De la guerre aux camps de concentration. Témoignages, Paris: C.G.C. & La Grande Revue, 1974; David Rousset, L'Univers concentrationnaire, 1946; Eugen Kogon, L'Enfer organisé: Le système des camps de concentration, Paris: La Jeune Parque, 1947 (the original German edition was published in 1946).
12. Kogon, op. cit., p. 96.
13. Kogon, op. cit., p. 154-155.
14. Henry Allainmat, Auschwitz en France. La vérité sur le seul camp d'extermination en France. Le Struthof, Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1974.
15. I wish to clarify that I am not discussing or casting doubt on the historical truth of the incidents, but studying the communicative stakes of a textual mode of (re)presentation of the “true reality.”
16. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967, p. 201.
17. “Claude Lanzmann, in his many interviews, explained that Shoah was neither a fiction, nor a documentary. One hesitates over the terms that are usually so con venient. What to say about Joseph Rovan's title Contes de Dachau (”Tales from Dachau“) or how to describe the work by Charlotte Delbo, Le convoi du 24 janvier (”The convoy on January 24th“), composed of biographical notices?” Reuter, op. cit., p. 111. (The work by Rovan was published by Juilliard in 1987; the work by Delbo by Editions de Minuit, 1965.)
18. Antelme, op. cit.
19. See the quotation above.
20. We borrow the term from Wladimir Krysinski, Carrefours de signes: essais sur le roman moderne, La Haye: Mouton, 1981.
21. This does not mean that there is first reality and then meaning. As has been demonstrated in other theories of cognition and communication, reality is caught and constituted in narrative and communicational structures in which one cannot economize.
22. Micheline Maurel, Un camp très ordinaire, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1957, republished 1985, p. 143, cited by Y. Reuter, op. cit., p. 113.