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Author:
Lyons, P. J
Title:
Literary and theological responses to the Holocaust
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LITERARY AND THEOLOGICAL RESPONSES TO THE HOLOCAUST
PHILIP J. LYONS
A thesis submitted to the University of Bristol in accordance with the
requirements for the degree of Ph.D. in the Faculty of Arts, Department of
Theology and Religious Studies.
September 1988
ABSTRACT
I am concerned in this thesis to assess the ways in which writers and
theologians have responded to the systematic murder of Europe's Jews by the
Nazis, an event now commonly referred to as the Holocaust. I take this event
to be of central importance in any understanding of Western culture.
Beginning with the writings of survivors themselves, I have sought to
address the question of what constitutes an appropriate response to the fact
of mass destruction. In considering imaginative versions of the Holocaust, I
have restricted myself to novels and short stories, offering a critique of selected
texts in the light of the historical event itself. I have singled out three novels
for special attention in a chapter on the pornographic tenor of some of this
literature.
If writers are confronted by the problem of making the event seem real
or credible, theologians are confronted by the problem of incorporating the
negative reality of the event into an affirmative tradition. I offer a summary
of Jewish theological responses in one chapter, and two chapters on relevant
aspects of contemporary Christian theology; namely, a re-examination of
suffering and the radical encounter with the Church's legacy of antisemitism.
I regard the respective enterprises of novelists and theologians as in
some measure complementary, believing that culture should where possible
be studied as a whole. The tenuous status of culture after Auschwitz makes
it imperative to recognize the extent to which the world has been irrevocably
changed by the epoch of genocide.
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ACKN OWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the various friends who read drafts of these chapters,
especially Rob Stones (who got me started in the first place) and Rosemary
Booth (who made sure I didn't stop). I would also like to thank the staff of the
Inter-Library Loans section of the University Library - Jean Bradford, Gordon
Richmond, Janet Quasnichka, and Joy Davis. Much of the material I needed
was tracked down by them.
My debt to John Kent, my supervisor, goes without saying. Moreover,
financial assistance in the form of a Major State Studentship from the DES
(more recently under the auspices of the British Academy) was instrumental
in making it all possible. I hope that submission of the thesis will go some way
towards repaying these bene factors.
Finally, let me say how grateful I am to Susan Reed for typing the whole
thing so promptly and so well.
I dedicate this thesis to Hannah Simpson, my niece and god-daughter,
born the week I embarked on it (though we both took a while to get our bearings),
and to her two sisters, Jessica and Rebecca. "An intellectual hatred is the
worst,/So let her think opinions are accursed."
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MEMORANDUM
I certify that the work contained in this dissertation is my own. It has
not been submitted previously for a degree at any other university.
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CONTENTS
Abstract . jj
Acknowledgements .......................................iii
v1ernorandurn ...........................................iv
IN' p.O]J U C'I'ION ........................................1
PART I. LITERARY RESPONSES TO THE HOLOCAUST
CHAPTER1. THESURVIVORASWITNESS ....................15
CHAPTERZ. HISTORYONTRIAL ..........................49
CHAPTER 3. GAZING INTO THE ABYSS: THREE AMBIVALENT TEXTS 89
PART II. THEOLOGICAL RESPONSES TO THE HOLOCAUST
CHAPTER4. JEWISHPERSPECTIVES ........................124
CHAPTER 5. CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVES (I): SUFFERING ........158
CHAPTER 6. CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVES (II): ANTISEMITISM 181
CONCLUSION..........................................217
BIBLIOP.APHY.........................................227
INTRODUCTION
All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage....
Whoever pleads for the maintenance of this radically culpable and shabby
culture becomes its accomplice, while the man who says no to culture
is directly furthering the barbarism which our culture showed itself to
be.
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics
Some forty years after the systematic degradation and murder of Europe's
Jews, I find myself asking what it means to accept that such a crime took place.
The debate surrounding the uniqueness of the Holocaust 1 seems misplaced in
the face of its enormity. Are we any less obliged to respond to what might
be described as state-sponsored genocide simply because it is not without
precedent? What kind of cynicism is it that says, in effect, we need not bother
too much with this phenomenon, it has all happened before? We are indeed
coming to the end of a century that has unleashed two immensely destructive
world wars, countless regional ones, and the continuing success of despotism
as a form of government. That something has gone very wrong with the advance
of civilization is hardly a reason for complacency.
"The Final Solution of the Jewish Question", in the phrase the Nazis chose
to conceal their plans for mass murder, provides a seemingly insurmountable
obstacle to anyone who wishes to believe that humankind has something to hope
for from the progress of history. Like Moses Herzog, the hero of a novel by
Saul Bellow, we are perhaps troubled by what seems to represent the spirit
of the age:
"You think history is the history of loving hearts? You fool! Look at these
millions of dead. Can you pity them, feel for them? You can nothing! There
were too many. We burned them to ashes, we buried them with bulldozers.
-1-
History is the history of cruelty, not love, as soft men think. We have
experimented with every human capacity to see which is strong and admirable
and have shown that none is. There is only practicality. If the old God exists
he must be a murderer. But the one true god is Death. This is how it is
- without cowardly illusions." Herzog heard this as if it were being spoken
slowly inside his head.2
Where is the voice to counter these thoughts?
This thesis is an attempt to find such a voice in the responses of writers
and theologians to the Holocaust. 3 The treatment of the Holocaust in literature
has become so extensive that I propose to limit myself to an examination of
its treatment in fiction, that is, essentially the novel, although I shall also be
considering the role of eyewitness testimony in defining the scope of what can
and cannot be said. Fiction produced by survivors would seem to occupy an
ambiguous position that merits being assessed in its own right.
My main justification for choosing the novel is a personal one: it is the
form of literature I most enjoy. But there is also a more general reason,
suggested to me in the course of reading The Sense of an Ending by Frank
Kermode. As he rather grandly puts it, "It happens that in our phase of civility,
the novel is the central form of literary art. It lends itself to explanations
borrowed from any intellectual system of the universe which seems at the time
satisfactory."4 Milan Kundera has argued something similar in an essay on "The
Novel and Europe". "The novel's essence is complexity," he claims. "Every
novel says to the reader: 'Things are not as simple as you think.' " Kundera
might have written "every good novel"; a distinguishing feature of bad novels
(and there are more than a few on the subject of the Holocaust) is a tendency
towards propaganda, simplification by distortion in much the same manner as
the mass media. Kundera himself is anxious to oppose the spirit of the mass
media with the novel's greater wisdom, what he calls "the wisdom of
uncertainty".6 Kermode finds this wisdom in the nature of fiction as something
which is consciously false.7 Fiction provides a way of making sense of the world
without appealing to the timeless authority of God or destiny.
-2-
Theologians, of course, are committed to some notion of divine authority,
but, whether Jewish or Christian, they now face the task of reconciling their
respective faiths with the fact of Auschwitz. For Jews the challenge is more
transparent: What does it mean to be a Jew after the destruction of so many
merely for existing? Christians are confronted by a number of questions: Can
the traditional belief that suffering makes holy still be affirmed in the light
of the apparently senseless suffering endured in the camps? To what extent
is the Church responsible for the antisemitism 8 that led to the Final Solution?
What are the implications of this for relations between Christians and Jews
today?
I do not wish to imply that novelists have an easier task than theologians
in coming to terms with the Holocaust. After all, the novel is a product of
Western humanism - "the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God",
Georg Lukcs calls it9 - which proved no more effective in resisting the
ideological lure of Nazism than did religion. But the novelist does have the
advantage of not being committed a priori to a set of beliefs and is free, unlike
the theologian, to let the imagination roam. How the imagination is able to
cope with the world of the death camps remains to be seen. What is clear,
however, is that only by a supreme effort of responsiveness (that is, using our
capacity to respond) can we begin to acknowledge Auschwitz as our heritage.
Let me illustrate the nub of the problem by citing an example of the way
in which news of mass murder was first received by the Allies. In The Terrible
Secret, Walter Laqueur describes the reaction of a prominent American judge
to what Jan Karski, a courier from Warsaw who had himself seen the death
camp at Belzec, had to tell him soon after being smuggled out of Poland towards
the end of 1942:
Karski told Justice Frankfurter everything he knew about the Jews, and
when he finished the Justice said some complimentary things and then, "I
can't believe you." Ciechanowski ... told Frankfurter that Karski had come
under the authority of the Polish Government and that there was no possibility
-3-
in the world that he was not telling the unadorned truth. Frankfurter: "I
did not say this young man is lying. I said I cannot believe him. There is
a difference."10
Even after the camps were liberated this incredulity persisted. Even today
the facts resist assimilation.
It is all the more urgent to find some way of responding to the death camps
in the wake of recent attempts to deny that they ever existed. The so-called
historical revisionists may be few in number, but the fact that neo-Nazi
apologetics have any support at all from the academic community is cause for
concern. Robert Faurisson, a French professor of history, provoked a scandal
with the publication of his claim that the gas chambers were a figment of the
imagination, yet he was nevertheless invited to air his views on American radio.
In an article on "Lies about the Holocaust", the historian Lucy Dawidowicz
relates how she was invited to debate with him:
While I was writing this article, a man associated with the Larry King radio
show, a national network talk program, called to ask if I would debate with
Faurisson. When I replied indignantly that Faurisson should not be provided
with a platform for his monomania, the man mildly inquired why I was against
discussing "controversial" matters on the radio. I in turn asked him if he
thought the murder of the European Jews was a "controversial" matter.
Had it not been established to his satisfaction as a historical fact? "I don't
know2" he answered. "I wasn't around at the time. I'm only thirty years
old."'
Has relativism thus triumphed over our capacity to respond to the nightmare
of history? Does the authority of the eyewitness count for nothing unless we
are eyewitnesses too? Is documentary evidence to be treated like fiction?
I would be over-reacting if I were to devote myself to the refutation of one
man's stupidity, but he and I belong to the same generation, and I perceive in
his response an unwillingness to accept the burden of the past. If we cut ourselves
off from our history, we are more likely than ever to repeat the mistakes of
earlier generations. Implicit in this man's statement is an indifference to the
fate of strangers. "Why should I care what happens to people I've never heard
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