Originally published in Comparative Literature 51 (Fall 1999): 266-88. © 1999. All rights reserved.

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1943)

The study of literature is widely presupposed to be the interpretation of texts. As an object a book can sit around for years, resting comfortably on a library shelf, but as a text it does not exist at all unless it is read, interpreted, understood. A book is printed and bound; a text is worded and meant. The problem, then, is to discover the meaning beneath the words. With the aim of study never in dispute, the critical wars of the last fifty years have been largely methodological: one side chants that a text means just what its author intended; the other, that its meaning exceeds the author’s intention; and meanwhile, smaller units gather under the banners of differing and rival approaches to getting beneath the words. No one has felt free to challenge the fundamental presupposition. But what if a literary text makes a claim on its readers that is logically prior to meaning? What if it has an existence that is not merely independent of interpretation, but threatened by interpretation?

Imagine that you are listening to a 70-year-old woman as she reads from the diary that she began to keep—in a little blank book she found at Sachsenhausen—in April 1945, when she was eighteen. She recites the Hungarian as her husband translates sentence by sentence into English.

Here is a text, as brief as a lyric, for which the training and working habits of academic criticism leave you unprepared. Is interpretation the appropriate response? And if so, how do you proceed? Do you point out to the woman what she has just said? Do you draw attention to her assumptions and rhetoric? Do you observe that she turns the ideology of difference back onto the German soldier, finding him—just as the Germans found the Jews—subhuman and immoral? Do you remark upon the gendered quality of her account? Imagine that the women begins softly to weep. That her husband joins her. That she goes to him, saying, "You are thinking of your mother too?" That they cling to each other. How are you to respond?

Geoffrey Hartman, who helped to found the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale University, has reflected as deeply as anyone upon the problem of responding to survivors. He insists it is not enough to listen, not enough even to empathize; survivor testimony is "a text in need of interpretation." And interpretation is the appropriate response, because it thwarts the tendency either to be numbed or to be moved overmuch. The worst possible outcome is to allow the "reactivated connection between survivors and their experience," the courage they display "in allowing themselves to recall a living death," to cause "paralysis or secondary trauma" in their listeners. An emotional identification, while necessary, "need not exclude a thoughtful, analytic response" (140). Survivor testimony "should not be used to substitute emotion for thought, or tears for the scholar’s resolute and continuous inquiry into the character of the perpetrators, their methods, the nature of the system, or other issues of conscience" (qtd. in Miller 274).

As his use of the word should reveals, what Hartman proposes is an ethics of response to Holocaust texts. And as the word should also reveals, his ethical impulse is deontological. That is, he prescribes a rule: you shall not substitute tears for analysis in interpreting Holocaust testimony. Surely Hartman is correct, surely the rule is a good one, and yet it is not altogether clear what constitutes "a thoughtful, analytic response."

The structure of his thought may give a clue. Hartman dichotomizes tears and inquiry, emotional identification and rational analysis, in a way that has become commonplace and perhaps even foundational in interpretive theory. The best-known version of the dichotomy belongs to Paul Ricoeur, who distinguishes a hermeneutic of recollection from a hermeneutic of suspicion. Under the guidance of recollection, interpreters understand that any human experience, no matter how extreme, has meaning for those who go through it. The task of interpretation then is to suspend amazement at the uncritical acceptance of this surface meaning and to enter into the experience, seeking to be moved. Under the guidance of suspicion, by contrast, interpreters assume that experience has a deeper, truer meaning—a meaning that is concealed from those who go through it. The task of interpretation then is to explain the true meaning and why it is concealed, unmasking the interests that are served by the concealment.2

What Hartman suggests is that a hermeneutic of recollection is inadequate to survivor testimony. Tears do not suffice. And yet it is highly doubtful that he would want the "thoughtful, analytic response" for which he calls to be a suspicious response. Even if they are true, the Marxist doctrine of false consciousness and the Freudian doctrine of repressed meaning (two of the most famous hermeneutics of suspicion) are abusive to Holocaust survivors. To suspect that the true meaning of their experience is concealed from them is to regard them either as dupes or insincere. It is to seek the distance of objective inquiry rather than the proximity of reassuring contact. And to pull back from a survivor when she is in need is to behave little differently from the German soldiers at Auschwitz. She does not have to pass a test to qualify for my attention and concern. To be in need is enough to put a demand upon me. How am I to respond? Academic interpretation cannot be the way. It encourages an attitude of suspicion, because it is founded upon the principle of meaning-concealed-beneath-the-surface. Emotional identification may not be an adequate response to a person in need, but academic interpretation is positively threatening to her. If survivor testimony is "a text in need of interpretation" it cannot be treated as a mere surface to be penetrated or dispensed with in the search for meanings that are deeper, more sophisticated, truer. A call of distress startles me out of my professional habits. Interpretation can only be subsequent to a more immediate response to human need—an ethical response, that is. This is the greatness of Hartman’s intuition about survivor testimony: ethics are prior to interpretation.

Yet Hartman’s deontological impulse does not suffice either. As the Christian theologian H. Richard Niebuhr points out, suffering cannot be brought adequately under the prescriptive shoulds of deontology, because it "is the exhibition of the presence in our existence of that which is not under our control. . ." (60). While deontology is the effort to reduce human conduct to should-statements, what does my suffering imply that I should do? The usual reply is that I should bear it with dignity, but this poses difficulties. Physical pain can be so massive and unbearable that it utterly routs the moral counsel to bear it with dignity. Instructing an AIDS patient that he should control his pain would not merely be cruel, but absurd. And this is the difficulty even with so compelling an account of suffering as the late Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. As his title announces, Frankl is concerned to give meaning to suffering. Himself a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau, he asserts that a person

Now it may be objected that Holocaust literature is hardly special in this regard. But the ethical question of responsibility is uniquely applicable to it, because the Holocaust was an enormity unprecedented and perhaps even unique in human history.3 It was conceived as the "final solution" of a world-historical "problem." An entire people was selected for extermination without regard to individual characteristics or circumstances. The enormity lies not in the numbers who were killed, nor in the "racial" identity of the victims, but in the objective of final, total extermination. If the Germans had succeeded in usurping die ganze Welt, every Jew alive would have been murdered. Because its objectives were finality and totality, the Holocaust stands as a possible challenge to everything in existence. For this reason the Christian theologian Franklin H. Littell calls it the crucifixion of the Jews: like the death of man’s Savior, the Holocaust radically calls into question all human values and therefore implicates every human being.4 It is a summons to answer for what I believe, a demand to reexamine and perhaps to revise my entire way of being. And this would be true even if it were decided that the Holocaust was not historically unique, because nevertheless it introduced the concept of genocide into human thought and changed for all time how we think of mass death. Not merely as a Jew—I once calculated that if I were to recite Kaddish Yatom for every one of the six million who died I would have to pray twelve hours a day for seventy years—but as a scholar, the demands that the Holocaust places upon me are determined, not by me (career opportunities, desire for advancement, interest and capacity), but by him, the corpse that gazes back at me in the last sentences of Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, the corpse whose eyes have never left me.

Perhaps more than any other genre, Holocaust literature poses the ethical question of responsibility. Not that it traffics in blame or guilt. Rather, Holocaust literature summons a counterfactual moral response—a response to past events that is counter to the fact that they are past repairing.5 In as far as it is an account of collective harm, Holocaust literature confronts its readers with the question whether responsibility is to be shared by them, despite the fact that they are not to blame. Holocaust texts provoke the disquieting question "What is being asked of me?" To answer this question fully interpretation is required, but unless there is a prior response of a certain kind—unless the Holocaust text is received as a summons—the problem of interpretation does not even arise. Thus interpretation contributes to the moral life by making it possible for a person to respond appropriately (though counterfactually) to human need. The way of reading that I am describing here is different in kind from what is customarily expected in literary study. It is not the discovery of meanings beneath an intelligible surface of words. It is not a matter of meaning at all, but of need. Ethically responsible reading does not seek to unmask the interests behind the Holocaust text, but rather to preserve it as the matchless revelation of a personality, requiring love.

The question of how to respond to the suffering around them tormented those who were trapped by the Holocaust. Consider the remarkable coincidence of two similar passages from the diaries of two Dutch Jews who were otherwise dissimilar in most respects. The first is from the diary of Etty Hillesum,

Etty Hillesum

a 28-year-old assimilated Jew whose lonely quest for God has become a classic of spirituality. On July 7, 1942, four days after she had recorded her "certainty" that the Germans "are after our total destruction" and just three short weeks before she was voluntarily transported to Westerbork (she died at Auschwitz in November 1943), Hillesum wrote:

Hillesum drew strength from her suffering, but unlike Frankl (quoting Dostoevski), she did not pray to be worthy of it, because she was not concerned to make an inner achievement of it. Her first concern was not with what her suffering meant, but with the more immediate fact that others were also suffering. Their pain was for her a summons to respond. Although she goes on to interpret her response, extracting principles from it which she highlights with the words You can and You must, this activity of interpretation is merely the subsequent reflection upon antecedent feelings of responsibility for the sake of others. She seeks to give some stability to these feelings by reworking them as moral knowledge, but the response to suffering comes first.

The second passage is from the diary of Moshe Flinker. A 16-year-old Orthodox Jew who wrote in Hebrew, Flinker

Moshe Flinker

was living in hiding in Brussels, where his family had fled in the summer of 1942 in the hope that they might survive where they were not known to their neighbors. Young Moshe, however, did not live under any illusion; he was aware that "the Germans mean to deport us all, bar none" (62). His family was arrested in April 1944 and transported to Auschwitz, where he and his parents were murdered. In his last diary entry, composed sometime in September 1943, he wrote:

Flinker offers a striking illustration of the rabbinical teaching that kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, "all Jews are responsible for one another" (Sifra on Leviticus 26.37; see Rabinovitch). But despite an excellent Jewish education, Flinker gives no evidence at all of knowing the codified version of this teaching. Although the Jewish tradition contains an authoritative basis for his moral feeling, it would not be accurate to say that the responsibility he feels for others is the rational application of Jewish moral theory. Something else is going on. Caught in a tragedy that is not individual but collective, Flinker is plunged into a moral crisis. Since he identifies with the Jews, and since Jews are suffering, he is faced with the challenge whether he participates in the suffering of his people. By a process of moral reasoning, he reaches a conclusion that many Jews before him had reached. The ethical response to collective suffering is distilled in the maxim kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh or "I feel responsible for every single pain."

Perhaps the best account of responsibility to emerge from the Holocaust is that of the late Emmanuel Levinas.

Emmanuel Levinas

Although the philosophical discussion of responsibility is at least as old as Aristotle’s Politics, since the Holocaust the term belongs by rights to Levinas.6 A naturalized French Jew born in Kovno, Lithuania, 92 percent of whose 30,000 Jews were murdered by the Germans (including most of his family), Levinas survived the war as a French officer in a pow camp near Hanover, studying Hegel, Proust, Diderot, and Rousseau between shifts of forced labor in the German forests.7 It is likely that he experienced the "belated shame" which, according to Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved, "gnaws and rasps" at every survivor of the Holocaust:

It is likely that Levinas was tormented by such shame, because his entire philosophy grows out of the inchoate anxiety, which parallels Levi’s "shadow of a suspicion," that one person’s life usurps another’s. All those who lived through the years 1939 to 1945 "retained a burn on their sides," he remarks, "as though they had to bear for ever the shame of having survived" ("From the Rise of Nihilism" 221). Levinas argues that human subjectivity or self-consciousness—the foundation of the self—is mauvaise conscience, the feeling of being "not guilty, but accused." Stripped of its intentionality, its reaching out to grasp an object of knowledge ("an other of consciousness"), existing in a condition of passivity, the human subject is put into question. What am I? To be, I have to respond. "But, from that point," Levinas explains, "in affirming this me being, one has to respond to one’s right to be." Self-consciousness is self-justification, because it is consciousness of being without the intention of being. I am aware of my existence, but I did nothing to bring about my existence. And therefore I am prey to the gnawings of conscience. Is it possible that I came into being as the result of a crime of which I am unaware? Levinas puts it even more strongly:

Since the first stirrings of consciousness are the gnawings of conscience, the first question before the human subject is the ethical: how are you going to respond to this uneasy sense of being "not guilty, but accused"? All human action, every effort to budge from the passivity of subjectivity, is a response to ethical challenge. Hence ethics are "first philosophy," logically prior to any other mode of thought.

Socrates’ deontological advice that it is better to suffer injustice than to cause it (Gorgias 469c) is of small assistance to him who is rasped by the mauvaise conscience that he has already caused injustice. "Self-consciousness is not an inoffensive action in which the self takes note of its being," Levinas says; "it is inseparable from a consciousness of justice and injustice" ("Religion for Adults" 16). What he proposes is to replace deontology with a counterfactual ethics of responsibility. If I am not guilty of hurting another I cannot be blamed for it, but if I nevertheless feel accused of it I can take responsibility for it. In this way perhaps I can both ease my conscience and begin to repair any damage that I might have caused. My responsibility to the person I might have hurt—the human Other or Autrui, in Levinas’s terminology—preempts any claims of my own. Because the injury is counterfactual, because it is not specified and therefore not limited, my relation to the other is a relation of infinite responsibility, which means there is no escaping it ("Transcendence and Height" 20-21).8 In Buber’s familiar terms, not to respond is to treat the other as an It rather than a Thou, an object to which things are done rather than a person with whom I might speak. But for Levinas there is no not responding. To ignore another to shame her, to make her aware of her isolation from me, and thus to duck the responsibility for not hurting her in these ways. Everyone is responsible to another whether he knows it or not. Being human is living in responsibility. Levinas’s ethics are not prescriptive, then, but descriptive. It is not that I should be responsible; I already am responsible by virtue of having consciousness. Every new encounter with another raises the question how I am going to respond to her. Although it is not prescribed, how to respond is a decision entirely within my command. Either I can accept responsibility or I can default—there is no third alternative. The injustice to another "imposes itself upon me," Levinas says, "without my being able to be deaf to its call or to forget it, that is, without my being able to suspend my responsibility for its distress" ("Meaning and Sense" 54).

These days we like to say that knowledge is ideological, by which we mean that it belongs to a historical world and is composed by the particular interests of that world. But a human being cannot be reduced to an object of knowledge; the effort to do so is "disturbed and jostled by another presence," which cannot be "integrated into the world"—namely, the presence of a human face ("Meaning and Sense" 53). This is perhaps Levinas’s most famous insight. The human face is the site of human personality. "The face is not the mere assemblage of a nose, a forehead, eyes, etc.," he says; "it is all that, of course, but takes on the meaning of a face through the new dimension it opens up in the perception of a being" ("Ethics and Spirit" 8). The other is always already a Thou, because she has a face; she foredooms every effort to reduce her to an It, because objects do not have faces. When I look upon the other’s face, I perceive the presence of something more than a composition of interests: I glimpse a being. Her face establishes her uniqueness, her irreducibility to explanatory context, her being-in-herself. Perhaps I can account for her behavior, but I can never account for her face. Her presence before me, revealed by her face, is a summons to respond, to bestir and thus to identify myself: "here I am" ("God and Philosophy" 182-84).9 The I-Thou relation is constitutive of the self, not the other. I construct myself as a person by how I respond to others. But I can also deconstruct myself. I can withhold myself in unresponsive silence, leaving open the possibility that I have treated the other unjustly, or I can seize her in an effort to know her, committing an act of violence which transforms counterfactual injustice into actual injustice ("Transcendence and Height" 15-17).

So responsibility precedes understanding. Now this would seem to be a paradox, since the response to another usually takes the form of speech and speech is usually taken to designate a meaning. Levinas observes, however, that speech has a moral purpose which is distinct from its linguistic purpose: you speak to me not only to disclose a semantic content but also to establish and deepen a relationship with me. And you await my response. Speaking to another, as Levinas puts it, is a self-denuding before the other, "the risky uncovering of oneself, in sincerity, the breaking up of inwardness and the abandon of all shelter, exposure to traumas, vulnerability" (Otherwise than Being 48). All speech is testimonial before it is propositional. It is a confiding, a plea for acceptance, a building of trust. Everything depends upon how it is received. To listen exclusively for the message is to treat as nothing your courage in revealing yourself or, worse, to be suspicious of your sincerity. It is to humiliate or, worse, to reject you. In either case, it is a failure of love, because all self-revelation is an act of love and a summons to love in return ("Franz Rosenzweig" 57). To answer you, I must renounce all claims to domination and sovereignty—I must abandon the powerful position of silence—and acknowledge your claims upon my attention and concern. The dialogue of speech and response, then, as Levinas puts it, "institutes the moral relationship of equality and consequently recognizes justice" ("Ethics and Spirit" 8).

Like speech-act theorists, Levinas analyzes speech according to how the saying is said—whether in or for or by—but unlike speech-act theorists, he distinguishes types of speech not in formal terms, but in the intentionality of speaking and listening. Speech is "for-the-other" when it is offered as testimony on behalf of the other, but it is "by-the-other" when it is heard as testimony by her own means. In speech for-the-other I designate an object of communication, because I have a responsibility to communicate with you; but in speech by-the-other you display a willingness to be wounded, you risk "suffering without reason," and I have a responsibility to attend to you (Otherwise than Being 50). Thus propositional meaning is a dialogical byproduct of responsibility: speech by-the-other is answered with speech for-the-other. Understanding is possible only because I accept you as a partner in a face-to-face dialogue before I even try to understand you. I speak to you, not to disclose my understanding, but to assume responsibility toward you. And this is the basis of community, because in responding to you I assume responsibility toward you "on behalf of someone else." To speak for-the-other is to engage the interest of everyone who has interests in common ("Toward the Other" 20-21).

Here Levinas approaches the concept of collective responsibility, which emerged in post-Holocaust philosophy to characterize German guilt. According to this thinking, members of a community are held responsible for things they did not participate in but which were done in their name. Levinas, however, does not ground collective responsibility upon a duty of political participation, which entails what Hannah Arendt calls "the silent dialogue between me and myself" to arrive at one’s duty (48-50). There is little on Arendt’s showing to prevent this silent dialogue from concluding with the decision to cause injustice. At such a pass, injustice would have to be prevented by appeal to something outside the self, and Arendt cannot say what this might be. For Levinas, however, the self just is its response to the other. The dialogue of morality is not between me and myself, but between you and me. Your call of distress accuses me, even if I am not guilty of making you call out, because your distress confronts me with the question whether I am going to do anything to relieve it. And I can assume (or deny) responsibility on behalf of someone else—someone who might be obligated to you, either by cause (he is guilty) or kinship (he is family). Members of a community are held responsible for things they did not participate in but which were done in their name, because a community springs from the responsibilities that its members assume toward one another, even if they are not obligated to do so.

Levinas’s ethics of responsibility can help to explain the distinguishing properties of Holocaust literature. Since the Nazis sought to destroy all evidence of the gas chambers and crematoria, it is not uncommon for Holocaust memoirists to declare that they write in order to bear witness to Germany’s crimes. They imply or state outright that their literary efforts are undertaken (to cite the title of one memoir) out of a commitment to the dead (see Waterford). The locus classicus is a passage in a fictional letter from Auschwitz by Tadeusz Borowski in which the writer resolves to himself, speaking for all the Häftlinge:

The acceptance of the role of witness seems to give rise to the entire genre of the Holocaust memoir. "I vowed to them in Auschwitz, as I stood near their ashes behind the crematorium," recalls Ka-Tzetnik 135633, "that I would be their voice, that I wouldn’t stop telling their story till my last breath" (15). Nor is it only "professional" writers like Borowski and Ka-Tzetnik 135633 who take this vow. "Because Hitler wanted to rid the world of Jews," writes an elderly memoirist nearly fifty years after liberation, "I must say to all, proudly and loudly, ‘I am a Jew, I am alive! Hitler has failed.’ I must bear witness to what was perpetrated" (Salsitz 389). Phrases repeated so often, with such small variation, are in danger of becoming conventionalized and routine, a variety of self-reinforcing discourse rather than a reflection of memoirists’ struggle with their memory.

A more nuanced account is to be found in Primo Levi.

Primo Levi

Although his reflections on bearing witness arise from a similar assumption, Levi’s last book The Drowned and the Saved redefines witnessing to as witnessing for. His attitude toward survival is not triumphant. Like several of his peers—Borowski, Jean Améry, Paul Celan, Jerzy Kosinski—he took his own life. Nor did he and his fellow Häftlinge experience liberation from the Lagers with any joy:

Instead of joy, survivors experienced the shame I have already discussed. Now, however, it becomes clear why Levi uses the word shame. With the return of responsibility came the "consciousness of having been diminished" (75). Having been stripped of everything but the particularity of their being—having lost the sense of being answerable to someone other than themselves—the survivors lost their identities as moral agents. Yet it is not quite right to suggest that they suffered an identity crisis, for this would imply that the mere persistence of being in their being is shamelessly extended after the Holocaust as a search for self.10 If autobiography is an interpretation of self the Holocaust memoir does not even belong to the genre of autobiography. Although it is not necessarily written "out of a kind of moral obligation toward those who were silenced," Holocaust literature is "a discourse ‘on behalf of third parties.’" Its source lies not in the self and the self’s obligations but in a primordial mode of the human,

Prior to obligation, prior to the self, there is the anguish of being alive in a world without form and void—the persistence of being for oneself—which is reversed in speech for-the-other. Despite the declarations of many of its writers, Holocaust literature is not adequately described as a literature of witness, because "the survivors," as Levi observes, "are not the true witnesses"; they were a "minority" in the Lagers—the "exception" rather than the "rule" (83-84). Of the 1.3 million persons deported to Auschwitz at least 85 percent died there (see Piper 70-71). The true witnesses were those who did not return to tell about it or returned mute; the survivors speak on their behalf.

For Levi, life after the Holocaust begins with the assumption of responsibility toward the dead and mute. During the evacuation march from Auschwitz in January 1945, his friend Alberto D. vanished—Alberto whom he describes proudly in his first book as "the rare figure of the strong yet peace-loving man against whom the weapons of night are blunted" (Survival in Auschwitz 57). As soon as he was repatriated to Italy, Levi explains years later, "I considered it my duty to go immediately to Alberto’s hometown to tell his mother and his brother what I knew." The family greeted Levi warmly, but when he began his story, they begged him to stop; they already knew everything. Alberto was not dead; he had slipped away from the ss and had hidden in the forest; he was now safe in Russian hands, and though he was unable to send word, he would do so soon. "Alberto never returned," Levi writes. "More than forty years have passed. I did not have the courage to show up again and to counterpose my painful truth to the consolatory ‘truth’ that, one helping the other, Alberto's relatives had fashioned for themselves." What Levi fails to do in life he offers as the foundational gesture of his literary career instead: he commits the "painful truth" to paper, assuming responsibility for dispelling "consolatory ‘truth’" on behalf of one who "permitted himself no indulgences" (Drowned and Saved 34). Skeptics may leap upon Levi’s distinction between the two kinds of truth, but the only reason it arises is that Levi assumes responsibility toward him to whom it is an injustice not to insist upon the distinction. The literature of survivors is really the shame and anguish of survival reversed into testimony for the sake of others who cannot themselves testify to the crimes committed against them.

By speaking for the victims after the fact, the "saved" make common cause with the "drowned" in pursuing justice. At the time, the members of no other community spoke up for them; no one else was willing to accept the responsibility. The injustice was not recognized. The contemporary world ignored the Jews’ calls of distress, and so the responsibility of speech for-the-other must be assumed in the aftermath: this is the common opinion of Holocaust writers.11 Responsibility is assumed because its absence at the time was and is felt so strongly. When news of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto reached the National Polish Council in London, Shmuel Zygelbojm, the Yidesher Arbeter-Bund’s representative to the Council, wrote:

On May 13, 1943, in a final act of protest against "the indifference of the world which witnesses the extermination of the Jewish people without taking any steps to prevent it," Zygelbojm set himself on fire in front of the British Parliament (330).12 Holocaust writers have carried on his protest after the war. More than anyone else it is probably Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel

who has established the justness of the accusation that contemporaries were unwilling to accept responsibility for preventing genocide. In the original Yiddish, Wiesel’s Night was entitled Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Kept Silent), and though much of the anger seething in the original title was redirected toward God when a revised version was published in France two years later, enough remained to fix the idea.13

Night is the effort to answer the question how it was possible for European Jews in 1944—living closer than Boston is to New York—not to have heard of Auschwitz. No one who has read the book will forget Madame Schächter, the prophet of the ovens. On the transport to the Vernichtungslager, she suddenly begins to scream: "Jews, listen to me! I can see fire! There are huge flames! It is a furnace!" But her fellow Jews do not listen: "She’s mad! Shut her up!" (23). How is it they did not already know about the flames? Wiesel’s answer: the indifferent world did not warn them. "The London radio," to which they "listened every evening," reported "heartening news" from the front, but nothing about Auschwitz. "And we, the Jews of Sighet [Marmatiei], were waiting for better days, which would not be long in coming now." On March 19, 1944, "[t]he Budapest radio announced that the Fascist party had come into power" when regent Miklós Horthy was "forced to ask" Gen. Döme Sztójay, ambassador to Berlin and a leader of the Arrow Cross, "to form a new government." What the Budapest radio apparently neglected to add was that the Germans had occupied Hungary. "Before three days had passed, German army cars had appeared in our streets" (5-7). The 12,000 Jews of Sighet Marmatiei were deported to Auschwitz in four transports between May 14 and 22.

Perhaps the book’s most famous scene is young Eliezer’s first day at Auschwitz. Shortly after he was selected not to die immediately in the gas chamber, he was confronted with the full horror of the Lager:

Wiesel does not ask how it was possible to burn people. The counterfactual possibility that if conditions had been different the Holocaust might not have occurred is a wishful denial of responsibility. His question, rather, is this. Given the burnings, in the face of such suffering, how was it possible to keep silent? The Jews who were burned by the Germans, he charges, were "abandoned by the whole world" (69).

Wiesel’s entire career is devoted to the exploration of this collective irresponsibility. In his writing he says almost nothing about the motives behind genocide. To explain the will of the executioners is to make their crime rationally comprehensible, which is the first step toward justifying it. After all, it is possible to concur with a "reason." But there can be no possible "reason" for the annihilation of the Jews.14 He is more concerned with the inhabitant of The Town beyond the Wall—the "spectator" who is "there, but he acts as if he were not" (148). In that book Wiesel adopts an explicitly Levinasian vocabulary:

The victims of German genocide listened for speech by-the-other which never came. This is what could have been otherwise. Instead of looking on and accepting the annihilation of the Jews, instead of passively assenting to things it did not participate in but which were done in its name, the world might have spoken up in the names of the victims, making common cause with them, not the Nazis. But the Jews were treated as faceless and nameless non-persons; the members of a community do not include sticks of wood. The world was silent.

In struggling to comprehend the Holocaust, it is important to realize that nothing was ever done to only one person; under the Nazis, suffering was multiplied endlessly. Repetition is the machine-like drone of Holocaust study. Although the theme of silence is so closely identified with Wiesel that it has become itself a subject of study, it is not uniquely his.15 Levi conceives the world more narrowly, but he too is haunted by its silence. In Survival in Auschwitz he recalls the night on which he dreamt that he was back home, describing the Lager to family and friends. He imagines speaking

The indifference of the other becomes a grammatical element of the Häftling’s mental universe. In None of Us Will Return Charlotte Delbo records a nearly identical dream:

The nightmare of not being listened to is "bearable," Delbo goes on, only in comparison with "another nightmare, that of our real death." Frankl says something similar: "[N]o dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us. . ." (41). The gas chambers and crematoria belong to reality; they cannot be negated nor denied. But the indifference of the other belongs to possibility; it could be otherwise. Hence it is more bearable. It is an affirmation of what might yet exist, and so it is an act of faith and trust. But when no one responded to their cries, the victims of genocide (in Jean Améry’s memorable phrase) lost trust in the world (28).16

In the nightmare of not being listened to begins the responsibility of Holocaust literature. For the nightmare is an invitation to proximity and reassurance. And thus the indifference of the other becomes the goad of conscience. Trust in the world can be restored: proximity and faith that have been eroded by a failure of responsibility can be repaired by a resumption of responsibility on behalf of those who failed at the time.

Holocaust literature is an invitation to responsibility for the victims of genocide. It beckons the reader, the spectator to genocide, to a rebuilding of community with the abandoned of the world, restoring them to the human nexus. The restoration is counterfactual, because in fact two-thirds of those who were abandoned to Hitler never returned.17 But Holocaust literature creates the possibility after the fact of responding to their calls of distress. Not that it does so by encouraging them in their victimization. Holocaust literature is not an appeal for pity—strength’s condescension to weakness—but a summons to responsibility.

Survivors of Dachau From Robert H. Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart (Oxford, 1985)

The call of distress is a demand for justice, because when an innocent people is targeted for total extermination, the moral balance of the entire world has been unsettled. The victims can find no peace, not even in death, until the crimes against them have been redressed. And faced with their suffering, the spectator is challenged to take up their cause.

Hence much of the earliest literary reaction, in America at least, was an anguished desire to tend to the survivors. U.S. Signal Corps’ photographs and newsreel footage of the "refugees," cadaverous and staring, began to appear in American magazines and moviehouses after the liberation of Nordhausen and Buchenwald in April 1945. The first writers were overwhelmed by the need to respond in some way. Consider, for instance, this 1946 sonnet by Betty S. Tigay, which is also among the earliest uses of the term holocaust18

Doubtless this is mere magazine verse, perishable and undistinguished; and though I cannot be certain—I have been unable to learn anything more of Tigay, not even whether she was a survivor—my guess is that her poem is a dramatic monologue. The theological reassurance of the concluding couplet is too pat for anyone who really had "felt the torment of every groan. . . ." Yet what is remarkable about the poem is Tigay’s effort to enter into the torment: to inhabit and possess it. By the end of the poem, it is no longer clear whether the speaker is a survivor of Germany’s death factories or the poet herself in first person, a spectator who has been lacerated and maimed by "the sight of my brethren grieving. . . ." The confusion of identities is probably unintended, but as Levinas has shown, it is also the onset of responsibility. Confronted with the accusation of another’s suffering, the I is put in question.

Or take this poem from 1949 by Babette Deutsch. It is an improvement upon the foregoing, because for Deutsch emotional identification means compassionate proximity rather than merger or confusion. She is disturbed and jostled by the face of suffering, which in Levinasian terms is the perception of a being:

Again, this is not a perfectly adequate response, because it divides the sufferer from her disembodied "fate," which the poet—but apparently not the woman described in the poem—is in a privileged position to see. And doubtless this is intended as an act of tenderness, although nearly five decades later it connotes an unintended moral superiority. Yet it is precisely this slip that gives the rest of the poem its power. Prior to this claim of deeper understanding, prior to the thirteenth line, which introduces a note of self-consciousness, the poem achieves an unaffected purity of response. The self, the spectator, is reduced to compassion. That is its first philosophy.

I offer these poems by Tigay and Deutsch as models for the criticism of Holocaust literature. Both poets adopt a position of interpretive responsibility toward the victims they are representing, and this position is not open to them only. Indeed, they are not quite steady enough; as I have hinted, both of them fumble their responsibilities somewhat by not calibrating the distance carefully enough. Tigay draws so close to the survivor that she practically merges with him, while Deutsch pulls back in a self-protective benevolence. As anyone who has ever been involved with another person knows, however, this is nothing more than the problem of love. Theirs is a warm-hearted failure, and in their impulse to thwart "paralysis or secondary trauma"—to budge from passivity—by becoming the agent on behalf of another, Tigay and Deutsch set an example for the interpretation of Holocaust literature.

According to Levinas, it is not poets but critics who return literature to its ethical responsibility. In his essay "Reality and Its Shadow," Levinas argues that art (including literature) is irresponsible in as far as it encourages the contemplation of images, breeding passivity and paralysis. In tragedy, for example, the suffering of another is offered for enjoyment—the tragic pleasure, as it is sometimes called—instead of evoking the responsibility to relieve suffering. The tragic artist freezes or immobilizes the face of suffering, detaching it from the human reality. Every artistic representation is the image of an absent other, because an image is what a person leaves behind in withdrawing her being from it. Literature conceals this absence by soliciting the contemplation of the image, reality’s "shadow." Criticism is the ethical activity of restoring literature to responsibility by reattaching images to the human reality (130-43).

A literary text makes a claim on its readers that is logically prior to meaning, because it is all that remains of a being. This is particularly true of the Holocaust text, to which the indifference of the other—the nightmare of not being listened to—is a constant threat. The Holocaust text is testimonial before it is propositional: it testifies to beings whose being has been eliminated from the suffering it represents. And so it must be received before it can be analyzed. To analyze it prematurely—to rush to interpretation—is to convert Holocaust testimony from speech by-the-other into speech for-the-other. No longer is the other identified with the unfamiliar voice within the testimony, the sufferer or witness by whom it is delivered; the interpreter usurps the other’s place, assuming that the testimony is for him. This is an act of indifference by which the otherness of the other is denied and loss sight of. Instead of acting on her behalf, the interpreter acts on his own. The Holocaust text is treated as an object upon which to demonstrate his professional ingenuity.

But a text is independent of interpretation, because the other exists apart from me. Speech by her is not necessarily speech for me. To assume differently—to think that somehow her speech depends upon me—is to threaten its existence. If interpretation is to avoid doing further moral damage it must spring from a moral response to the other; it can depend upon nothing else. It cannot presuppose a difference between surface or "literal" and concealed or "poetic" meaning.19 It can only presuppose the otherness of the speaker from which derives my responsibility to her. And so it must pause to take its direction from her. The interpretive stance I adopt toward her is determined by the responsibility I assume toward her. Because this assumption could be mistaken—because I could be wrong in taking her to be asking for exactly this response from me—I must have recourse to interpretation. I must answer her, which means that I must try to translate speech by her (speech that she makes) into speech for her (speech that I make in reply). Doubtless the "interpretive community" to which I belong, to say nothing of my biases and perspective, will interfere with my good-faith effort to do this. And so they are not irrelevant aspects of interpretation. But before it is anything else interpretation is the effort to cast my response to the other into speech that is intended for her. It is what I understand her to need. In rhetorical terms, the audience for interpretation are the sufferers on whose behalf the Holocaust text witnesses. They are the reality to which I pledge my faith.

Nevertheless, I must expect to betray them more often than I am adequate to the challenge of their need. Holocaust literature is a summons to responsibility for the victims of genocide, but this merely describes what is possible, not what is real. Historicity is a reminder that some things are past changing. The reality of six million deaths is something I can neither alter nor deny; the suffering on six million faces is something to which I can never adequately respond. But if I can do nothing about the past I may yet affect the future. It is often said that the purpose of studying the Holocaust is to prevent it from ever happening again. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman says:

What this indicates is that the Holocaust does not belong only to history but also to possibility. If we cannot affect its outcome we can still do something about its meaning. Events mean nothing in themselves; they must be interpreted. But what this also indicates is that meaning arises from our responsibility. The counterfactual possibility of doing something appropriate about the Holocaust

is what creates our responsibility to it, and if what we want is to discover its meaning—that is, to interpret the Holocaust—then our interpretation must be shaped and guided by our responsibility.

And we can also shape ourselves. Or, rather, we can allow ourselves to be shaped. Paying tribute to the memory of murdered millions—responding to human suffering—will affect the kind of persons we are. The effect, however, will be unpredictable, as Myra Sklarew knows:

And in this way Holocaust literature contributes to the moral life. But since our response to it can never relieve suffering, we must offer it again and again. Again and again we must return from interpretation to what startled us into interpretation in the first place. We must shift our attention from the text’s message to the face that it evokes. This face is not a surface beneath which a meaning is concealed; it is the image of a being whose being has been annihilated. To speak in response—to move back into interpretation, to reattach the face to being—we must enter into a relationship with people who, once having inhabited a world in which the Jews were selected for extermination, now dwell forever in Holocaust texts. That this is not possible, but that it was possible for Germans to burn Jews and for the world to keep silent, is the accusation to which we must respond in interpreting Holocaust literature.

Notes

1. Edith Grossman Hollender, Unpublished Diary, May 1, 1945. Translated by Morris Hollender. Read aloud to (and recorded by) me in Watertown, Mass., in August 1997. Although Sachsenhausen was a male Lager, women were imprisoned there during the last weeks before it was liberated on April 27, 1945.

2. Ricoeur first uses the distinction in Freud and Philosophy 25-26. He reintroduces and develops it in "Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Culture" and in Rule of Metaphor to describe what he regards as typically modernist ideologies. For a sharp analysis of "surface" and "concealed" meaning in academic interpretation see Seamon. Ricoeur also distinguishes interpretation as such from the revelation of the sacred; and though he would not put it like this, what I will be arguing for in this essay is the priority of revelation—the disclosure of the wholly other—over interpretation, the assimilation of otherness to the self.

3. On the uniqueness of the Holocaust see Bauer; Arthur A. Cohen (27-32); Dawidowicz, Holocaust and the Historians (9-15, 119-20); Fackenheim, To Mend the World (280-88); Gilbert (824-25); Goldhagen (406-15); Katz; Langer; Lipstadt (215-16). An excellent short summary is Fackenheim, "Holocaust." Braiterman calls uniqueness the distinguishing feature of post-Holocaust Jewish religious thought (13-16). The claim of uniqueness has been violently attacked by Stannard; Churchill; Finkelstein.

4. See Littell. Many writers have argued that the Holocaust opened a rupture or "caesura" in human thought, but the most theoretically adequate versions of the argument are Arthur A. Cohen; Fackenheim, To Mend the World. The argument is considered in Rosenberg and Marcus; Leamon.

5. On counterfactual reasoning the primary source is Lewis. A less technical account of counterfactuality in ordinary life is Landman.

6. In post-Holocaust Anglo-American philosophy, the concept of responsibility has not been central. The principal exception is Feinberg. Although Niebuhr based his teaching at the Yale Divinity School upon responsibility, he did not begin systematically to reconceptualize Christian ethics in its terms until his retirement in 1962, and then he did not live long enough to complete the work; his fragmentary Responsible Self appeared posthumously. Nor have post-Holocaust Christian ethics followed Niebuhr’s lead. An exception is Trimiew. Wurzburger takes up the concept to argue against a prescriptive understanding of halakhah (Jewish law). Unaccountably, though, he appears to be ignorant of the Jewish thinker Levinas and relies instead upon Niebuhr. For a different account of the concept in Levinas see Waldenfels. For a different account of Levinasian responsibility and the Holocaust see Bauman 182-200.

7. As yet there is no biography of Levinas. For details of his life see Friedlander 80-90; Handelman, 177-81; Richard A. Cohen 115-21.

8. Prager, an American Jewish novelist, unconsciously invokes Levinas’s view, suggesting that it is not at all recherché, but somewhat ordinary. The title character asks her lover: "What responsibility do you and I have to a mound of skeletons in a mass grave murdered before we were conceived? None. But to the people those skeletons once were? Infinite" (34).

9. Levinas’s French me voici evokes the Hebrew hineni, the response to God by which Abraham, Moses, and Samuel identify themselves as prophets (Gen. 22.1, Exod. 3.4, 1 Sam. 3.4-8). The Biblical expression of irresponsibility is Cain’s response: "hashomer ahi anokhi (am I my brother’s keeper)?" (Gen. 4.9). Thus does murder identify itself for the first time (see Levinas, "Religion for Adults" 20).

10. For the assertion that the experience of shame is a crisis of identity see French 67-69.

11. The accusation that the contemporary world ignored the Jews’ calls of distress has been disputed by Rubinstein. Whether the accusation is historically valid, however, is beside the point I am making here—namely, the world’s silence is taken for granted in much Holocaust writing. It is a presupposition of the literature.

12. See also Gutman 241-42. Steiner gives no evidence of having read Zygelbojm’s letter, although he too formulates the principle that Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent. Yet he does quote without attribution "one of the last messages received by the outside world during the rising of the Warsaw ghetto: ‘The world is silent. The world knows (it is inconceivable that it should not) and stays silent. God’s vicar in the Vatican is silent; there is silence in London and Washington; the American Jews are silent. This silence is astonishing and horrifying’" (150, 160; emphasis in original).

13. For a thorough comparison of the Yiddish and French versions see Seidman.

14. Again, the argument against rational comprehension of Nazi motives has been disputed in the recent scholarly literature. Hence my allusion to Goldhagen. In this essay, I am agnostic on the question. My point, once again, is that the literature presupposes the impossibility or ethical danger of such comprehension. But in fairness I should also observe that the academic investigation of the Holocaust is currently divided between those who study the perpetrators and those who study the victims; and the argument against rational comprehension is occasionally advanced by the latter in criticism of the former.

15. On the theme of silence in Wiesel see Neher; Myriam B. Cohen; Sibelman.

16. Halivni recalls that at Auschwitz and Groß-Rosen, "I cherished the thought that if I ever survived and came home to my family and told them about my experiences, they would not believe me. So I used to prepare in my mind some kind of proof to convince them that I had experienced what I was relating to them, that I was not exaggerating" (61). Here the actuality of the Lagers—the thought that his family would not believe his account of them—is able to be borne ("cherished") only by the counterfactual preparation of mental proofs, which creates a possible alternative in which Halivni is able to imagine himself convincing his family. And as he makes clear in the passage immediately preceding, this is an act of faith. The thought of not being believed is checked in advance: "The thought that my family would be totally destroyed . . . did not enter my mind." If he had lost faith in his family’s survival, the counterfactual alternative would not have been available to him.

17. For statistics on the Jewish population in Europe before the Holocaust and the number of the dead see Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews 402-03. The differences in estimates among historians are surveyed by Piper 71-72.

18. Korman traces the term’s emergence to some time "[b]etween 1957 and 1959," but adds that writers like the philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen had applied the term to "the general destructive impact of Nazism . . . as early as 1945" (45-48). In private correspondence, Professor Korman and I have cordially disagreed over my claim that Tigay’s poem represents an early use of the term—at least as it was later adopted to designate a historical event. "My sense," Korman writes, "is that there is a significant difference in symbolic and rhetorical expression and the more formal kinds among historians" (letter of May 22, 1998). My reply, which I am developing in my book-in-progress New Bible from Auschwitz, is that the "symbolic and rhetorical" uses of the term were fixed prior to the "more formal" usage of historians and other scholars. The symbolism and rhetoric point to a religious conception of the event; it was this religious paradigm which was established by the late Fifties as the Holocaust. And it was this paradigm (not the term alone) which was subsequently adopted by historians and other scholars, although emptied of its religious content.

19. Levinas himself nods when he introduces these terms into a discussion of S. Y. Agnon in "Poetry and Revelation."

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