Trauma in First Person

Amos Goldberg

Description

What are the effects of radical oppression on the human psyche? What happens to the inner self of the powerless and traumatized victim, especially during times of widespread horror? In this bold and deeply penetrating book, Amos Goldberg addresses diary writing by Jews under Nazi persecution. Throughout Europe, in towns, villages, ghettos, forests, hideouts, concentration and labor camps, and even in extermination camps, Jews of all ages and of all cultural backgrounds described in writing what befell them. Goldberg claims that diary and memoir writing was perhaps the most important literary genre for Jews during World War II. Goldberg considers the act of writing in radical situations as he looks at diaries from little-known victims as well as from brilliant diarists such as Chaim Kaplan and Victor Kemperer. Goldberg contends that only against the background of powerlessness and inner destruction can Jewish responses and resistance during the Holocaust gain their proper meaning.

Preface
Introduction: "If This is a Man"
Section I: Reading Holocaust Diaries
1. Holocaust Diaries—Between Life Story and Trauma
2. Reading the Diaries as a Critique of Holocaust Historiography
3. The Dynamic of the Text between the Two Deaths—A Theoretical Model for the Reading of Traumatic Text
Section II: From Autobiographical Time to Documentation Time: Victor Klemperer's Diar
4. The Life Story of Victor Klemperer
5. The Disruption of Life-Story Time in the Klemperer Diaries
6. From Autobiographical to Documentary Diary
Section III: The Jewish Self and the Nazi Other: Chaim Kaplan's Warsaw Diary
7. Chaim Kaplan and his Diary
8. The Jews and Nazi "Law"
9. Between Perpetrators and Victims: The Gray Zone of Consciousness in the Diary of Chaim Kaplan
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• 20th Century
• Jewish Studies
• Jewish
• Modern
• Holocaust
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Jews
• The Holocaust
• Modern history
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Holocauste

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 20 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253030214
• Langue: English

Extrait

TRAUMA IN FIRST PERSON
TRAUMA IN FIRST PERSON
Diary Writing During the Holocaust
AMOS GOLDBERG
Translated from Hebrew by
SHMUEL SERMONETA-GERTEL and AVNER GREENBERG
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by Amos Goldberg
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Goldberg, Amos, author.
Title: Trauma in first person : diary writing during the Holocaust / Amos Goldberg ; translated from Hebrew by Shmuel Sermoneta-Gertel and Avner Greenberg.
Other titles: Traumah be-guf rishon. English
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017024825 (print) | LCCN 2017025462 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253030214 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253029744 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Historiography. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Personal narratives-History and criticism. | World War, 1939-1945-Personal narratives-History and criticism. | Jews-Diaries-History and criticism.
Classification: LCC D804.348 (ebook) | LCC D804.348 .G6513 2017 (print) | DDC 940.53/18072-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024825
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CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: If This Is a Man
Part I. Reading Holocaust Diaries
1 Holocaust Diaries: Between Life Story and Trauma
2 Reading the Diaries as a Critique of Holocaust Historiography
3 The Dynamic of the Text between the Two Deaths: A Theoretical Model for the Reading of Traumatic Texts
Part II. From Autobiographical Time to Documentation Time: Victor Klemperer s Diary
4 The Life Story of Victor Klemperer
5 The Disruption of Life-Story Time in the Klemperer Diaries
6 From Autobiographical to Documentary Diary
Part III. The Jewish Self under Nazi Domination: Chaim Kaplan s Warsaw Diary
7 Chaim Kaplan and His Diary
8 The Jews and Nazi Law
9 Between Perpetrators and Victims: The Gray Zone of Consciousness in the Diary of Chaim Kaplan
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
J OSEF Z ELKOWICZ , born in 1897, was an intellectual, affiliated with the Poalei Zion Left party (the Marxist Zionist Jewish workers party), and a resident of Lodz. In May 1940, Zelkowicz was confined to the ghetto along with the other Jews of the city, where he remained until his deportation to Auschwitz and subsequent murder. He documented reality in the ghetto and in particular the lives of the people imprisoned there, their moods, and their collapsing consciousness.
Zelkowicz understood that conditions of severe deprivation-terrible hunger, mortality, disease, the extreme violence of the Nazis, the reign of terror imposed by Judenrat chairman Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, and devastating poverty-create a particular social structure and generate a new kind of consciousness. Just like Primo Levi, he understood that harsh conditions do not lead to solidarity and spiritual improvement but, on the contrary, cause society to disintegrate and shatter the individual s very self and identity. They do not uplift people but, in most cases, debase them. With this understanding in mind, Zelkowicz wrote the following while inside the ghetto:

It is not only the external form of life that has changed in the ghetto. . . . It is not only the clothing that has come to look tattered and the faces to wear masks of death, but the entire Jewish trend of thought has been totally transformed under the pressure of the ghetto . . . . The ghetto, the great negator of the civilization and progress that people nurtured for centuries, has swiftly obliterated the boundaries between sanctity and indignity, just as it obliterated the boundaries between mine and yours, permitted and forbidden, fair and unfair. 1
And elsewhere, in a similar vein:

Grave crimes were committed in the ghetto. The gravest of them was the transformation of people who had worked for decades to maintain their culture and ways, the fruits of millennia of effort, into predatory beasts after half a year of life under inhuman conditions. Overnight they were stripped of every sense of morality and shame . Ghetto inhabitants pilfered and stole at every opportunity, whether they needed the booty or not. Some rummaged in the trash like pigs for leftovers, which they ate then and there. Some starved to death, but others, exploiting the opportunities available to them, stole, pilfered, gorged themselves, and drank themselves silly. 2
However, not only social solidarity, moral consciousness, cultural values, and Jewish ideals were utterly transformed under the conditions that prevailed in the Lodz ghetto, according to Zelkowicz. The personal history and identity of each and every individual were also completely undermined, sometimes to the point of collapse. The story of the pious Yaakov Eli-a deeply religious man, who made every effort to preserve his human dignity and pure faith, even in the ghetto-concludes with the following observation by Zelkowicz: What s the purpose . . . of all the effort that Yaakov Eli invested in himself for so many years, if a year and a half of life in the ghetto has transformed his inner essence so drastically that he repudiates his entire life ? 3 In the harsh conditions of the Lodz ghetto, the need to survive was many times linked to the repudiation of one s former life, until one s inner self had been transformed beyond recognition. The brutal reality imposed by the Nazis on their victims rendered the latter virtually helpless-not only in terms of external circumstances, controlled almost entirely by the Nazis, but also in terms of their inner natures, their moral values, their individual traits, and their very identities. The state of radical helplessness experienced by Jews during the Holocaust also devastated their inner worlds. The most destructive consequence of this situation-beyond the blurring of the other distinctions mentioned by Zelkowicz-was the fundamental blurring of the necessary separation between inside (that is, the individual s inner world) and outside (the events and power relations occurring in reality).
Faced with this extreme historical reality, the discipline of history itself would appear to stand helpless. Although the historiography of the Holocaust, written over the past seventy years, has been remarkably successful in reconstructing Jewish life during that period, historians have found it difficult to contend with the full extent of the helplessness that the Jews experienced. History is charged with describing what is -events, responses, survival, and struggle, communal, personal, and family activity-not what is not, such as help less ness. History deals with existence, not absence; with the formation and preservation of identity, not its extreme negation; with the construction and creation of frameworks and institutions, not their disintegration; with the development of ideas and processes of producing meaning, not their erasure. How, then, should history deal with a period characterized first and foremost by what it lacked, by its helplessness, without betraying its most essential aspect? How can we write history about what is not, about what is negated, about what has disintegrated or been distorted?
The question becomes even more pressing in the context of historical consciousness and the collective memory of the Holocaust among Jews (including Israeli Jews) and significant numbers of non-Jews for whom the Holocaust acts as a central identity-founding event. How can identity be founded upon an event at the heart of which stands the disintegration of identity, negation, helplessness, and defeat?
Public consciousness in many places around the world appears at a loss when it comes to this issue as, to a great degree, does the historiography on the Jews during the Holocaust. Both tend to ignore the fundamental undermining of identity and deny the deep cracks in the image of the victim-although these are amply and vociferously reflected in writings from that period, such as those of Zelkowicz, cited above. The image of the Jews during the Holocaust in popular and historical representations generally follows the optimistic paradigm, presuming the successful preservation-with few exceptions (which naturally serve to reinforce the rule)-of social values and human and Jewish identity, at least as long as circumstances permitted.
History books thus dedicate numerous pages to Jewish institutions and organizations during the Holocaust and to the various forms of endurance and resistance. Museums shape the image of the victim as one who preserved human and social values, held on to personal beliefs, and conducted a vibrant religious, family, and cultural life under all conditions-even in the Auschwitz death camp. The social disintegration, the shattering of identity, and the internal rifts are hardly mentioned-as if the horrors of the outside (persecution, hardship, murder, e