The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust.

Ginsburg, Michal Peled

Reviewed by MICHAL PELED GINSBURG

In this collection of essays, the distinguished literary critic Geoffrey Hartman discusses a whole array of issues related to remembering and representing the Holocaust. Hartman points out that the crucial question for us today is not whether something as atrocious as the Holocaust can be represented. Since "our modern technical expertise is such," he writes, "that simulacra can be provided for almost any experience, however extreme, it is more today a question of should not rather than cannot" (p. 84). In other words, the technical question of "how" has to be replaced with the moral one of "to what ends." Hartman's essays are a sustained and nuanced critique of realism's refusal, carried in the name of "truth," to set limits to representation.

Like others before him, Hartman argues that the media has "turned all of us into involuntary bystanders of atrocities, reported graphically and hourly" (p. 152). The problem with this boundless and hyper-realistic representation is double: on the one hand, it is a violent assault on the spectator, a visual shock repeating the trauma of the participants with a "secondary trauma" of the audience. On the other hand, there is the opposite danger: that there will be no shock, no trauma; that the routine exposure to atrocities will inure us against them, will make us indifferent. And though this numbing effect teaches us a lesson about human beings (it makes us realize that the indifference of many bystanders to the Holocaust was not caused - or not only caused - by ignorance) this in itself does not constitute a justification for modes of representation that induce indifference.

The reasonable commitment to historical veracity often leads to the creation of simulacra-make-believe replicas of the real-in representations of the Holocaust. The problem with this version of realism is again double. On the one hand, the most faithful representation is not realistic enough; on the other hand, this kind of realism produces its own "unreality effect": "We are spellbound, yet something in us keeps saying 'This is (only) a film'" (p. 158).

It is in the context of this double critique of (mostly visual) realism that Hartman places his argument for the value of survivors' testimony. There are many ways of arguing for the value of this form of representation, first of which is probably the need to transmit more than images of victimage (p. 24). Moreover, as Hartman convincingly argues, these audio-visual documents "use video to counter a video-inspired amnesia" (p. 92). Every testimony rescues, in the words of the novelist Appelfeld "'the individual with his own face and proper name' from the place of terror where that face and name were taken away" (p. 155); it also rescues a particular experience from the "technology-induced sameness" characteristic of our time (p. 92). It is a complex mode of representation: "As history it seeks to convey information, but as oral witness it is an act of remembrance . . . it contributes to a group biography through highly individual yet convergent stories" (pp. 109-110). Stories converge, and yet voices remain individual, the past is recreated but remains firmly anchored in the present, the narrative tells it all, and yet does not create "secondary trauma"; the video testimony avoids both the artificiality and falseness of realistic film and the distance of documentaries. In short, in Hartman's well argued opinion, "testimonies, with their balance of realism and reticence [are] a less problematic form than docudramas that seek to overwhelm with naked imagery, or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, symbolic modes that aspire to mystery and generality" (p. 156).

The description and analysis of Holocaust testimonies is a major topic of Hartman's book of essays, but it is by no means the only one. It contains chapters on Bitburg; on Vichy; on Spielberg's Schindler's List, Gouri's Eighty-First Blow, and Lanzman's Shoah; on Celan. It is a book that carefully analyzes and weighs complex issues; it is infused with a sense of moral responsibility and passion without falling into either pathos or moralizing.

MICHAL PELED GINSBURG is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of French and Italian at Northwestern University. She is the author of Flaubert Writing: A Study in Narrative Strategies (1986) and Economies of Change: Form and Transformation in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (1996).