Representing Auschwitz: At the Margins of Testimony (The Holocaust and its Contexts)

"The Holocaust is often described as beyond representation. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, this ground-breaking collection of essays by leading international scholars takes the Scrolls of Auschwitz as its starting point. These powerful hand-written testimonies, which were buried in the grounds of the crematoria at Birkenau in 1944, seek to bear witness to mass murder from at its core. The accounts, which are often marginalized in studies of Holocaust testimony, are frequently highly literary and ask significant questions of the notion that Auschwitz cannot be attested to. The volume also includes a number of essays that consider other forms of testimony, in media such as film, literature and video, which have also been marginalized as they fail to conform to dominant ideas about the nature and structure of the event"-- Provided by publisher Front Matter....Pages i-xiii Introduction: Representing Auschwitz — At the Margins of Testimony....Pages 1-10 The Harmony of Barbarism: Locating the Scrolls of Auschwitz in Holocaust Historiography....Pages 11-32 On the Problem of Empathy: Attending to Gaps in the Scrolls of Auschwitz....Pages 33-57 ‘The Dead Are My Teachers’: The Scrolls of Auschwitz in Jerome Rothenberg’s Khurbn....Pages 58-84 Chain of Testimony: The Holocaust Researcher as Surrogate Witness....Pages 85-103 What Remains — Genocide and Things....Pages 104-129 Representing the Einsatzgruppen: The Outtakes of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah....Pages 130-150 Reconciling History in Alain Resnais’s L’Année dernière `Marienbad (1961)....Pages 151-173 Gender and Sexuality in Women Survivors’ Personal Narratives....Pages 174-193 Art as Transport-Station of Trauma? Haunting Objects in the Works of Bracha Ettinger, Sarah Kofman and Chantal Akerman....Pages 194-221 Coda: Reading Witness Discourse....Pages 222-226 Back Matter....Pages 227-233 This collection of essays by leading international scholars takes the Scrolls of Auschwitz as its starting point. These powerful hand-written testimonies, produced within Birkenau, seek to bear witness to mass murder from at its core. The highly literary accounts pose a fundamental challenge to the idea the Holocaust cannot be attested to.