Zoë Vania Waxman. Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. x + 227 pp. $36.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-920638-4.

Reviewed by Joanne Sayner (Department of German Studies, Birmingham University)
Published on H-German (November, 2007)

The Importance of History

When the publishing blurb of a book promises that the author will examine "the full history of Holocaust testimony," it cannot be anything but a provocation for the reviewer. In fact, in her introduction Zoë Waxman carefully delineates what her study does and not include. In five chapters, she examines testimonies of the "first chroniclers, confined to the Nazi-enforced ghettos; the rare testimony constructed in the concentration camps; and post-war testimony" (p. 2). The focus is on texts also available in English and mainly, but not exclusively, written "as a specifically Jewish response to the events of the Holocaust" (p. 3). Throughout, Waxman includes poignant, powerful extracts of texts written during and after the Holocaust by the targets of its horror. Names now well known to many studying and teaching Jewish and non-Jewish Holocaust testimony (Primo Levi, Charlotte Delbo, Jean Améry, Tadeusz Borowski, Fania Fénelon, Anne Frank) are discussed alongside those whose texts may not be so frequently cited. The comprehensive footnotes Waxman provides will prove valuable for those new to the subject or interested in researching further a specific context.

Broadly, the chapters progress chronologically. Chapter 1, "Writing as Resistance? Bearing Witness in the Warsaw Ghetto," considers diaries written in the ghettos, although often published much later. Chapter 2, "Writing to Survive: The Testimony of the Concentration Camps," examines the very few diarists who managed to write and hide notes in the camps, from office workers to members of the Sonderkommando. Such texts were written at the time and many were discovered after the end of the war. I find Waxman's discussions in these two chapters about resistance and testimony illuminating and productive. Chapter 3, "Writing to Remember: The Role of the Survivor," addresses texts published after the war and considers a range of different geographical contexts. The next two chapters, "Writing Ignored: Reading Women's Holocaust Testimony" and "Writing the Ineffable: The Representations of Testimony," take a more theoretical look at some challenges faced by those writing and studying testimony, in particular, issues of gender and language. Waxman argues that a change has occurred in the nature of bearing witness, which is linked to the very different situations that those in ghettos, concentration camps, and postwar societies faced. She argues that it remains necessary for scholars to examine such testimonies in detail and to look at the texts in all their complexities in order to continue to complicate and diversify the histories of the Holocaust.

The aim of Waxman's study seems to be encapsulated in her introductory comment that "it is necessary to resist the tendency of recent Holocaust scholarship to universalize or collectivize Holocaust testimony, and instead to revive the particular by uncovering the multiple layers within testimony" (p. 1). She continues: "It is only by exploring the social and historical context of Holocaust testimony that we can appreciate the sheer diversity of witnesses' experiences" (p. 1). The socially and historically constructed nature of such testimony and its inevitable heterogeneity is something that Waxman repeatedly stresses, and indeed, maybe it cannot be said too often. Waxman is clearly writing against what she perceives as the unifying tendencies within Holocaust scholarship and "collective memory."

Given the important emphasis on diversity within the texts she is studying, however, I would have liked her to elaborate on some issues. Waxman reiterates that "there is no universal survivor experience" (p. 89) but it is not always clear which "recent Holocaust scholarship" she believes perpetuates such universalization. For example, who is "conflat[ing] writing in the ghettos, writing while in hiding, the texts of escapees, and writing in the camps" (p. 54)? Who, in her opinion, is trying to promote a uniformity of ghetto experience? When are/were they writing? Similarly, in relation to chapter 4, do all testimonies written by women and analyzed by academics attempt "to say something universal about women" (p. 151) or have such texts influenced, and been influenced by, changing understandings of women's roles in different geographical contexts and decades since the end of the war? She argues that "studies of women and the Holocaust tend to portray female witnesses in much the same way as child witnesses, as unproblematic victims" (p. 125). For Waxman, such depiction is problematic because "assumptions about women's behaviour obscure the diversity of their Holocaust experiences" (p. 150). But what about the work of Joan Ringelheim and Karen Remmler, among others, who have stressed the need for caution during "attempts to represent the specificity of women's suffering in the concentration camps"? They specifically warn against "essentialist reinscriptions of femininity instead of insights into the structures that constitute gender difference in situations of utter dehumanization."[1]

Questions also arise about Waxman's employment of the term "collective memory." The rationale for chapter 4 is stated as follows: "This chapter focuses on the testimonies of women, not because it is they who are normally excluded from history, but because it is the representation of women's experiences that best illustrates how collective memory obscures the diversity of Holocaust testimonies" (p. 125). Here, in Waxman's use of the term, it is unclear whether she considers the often marginalized, feminist approaches to testimonies as a form of "collective memory." Moreover, who are the gatekeepers of the unified "collective memory" that she is so clearly writing against? She states: "The post-war introduction of the term 'The Holocaust' has meant that survivors' individual experiences have become part of collective historical memory" (p. 89). The very slipperiness of the term "collective historical memory" is emphasized by her own recognition that she personally has excluded discussion of many other testimonies (for example, those written by homosexuals, gypsies, and Jehovah's Witnesses). In wanting to look at "the ways in which the concept of the Holocaust acts as an organiser of memory" (p. 152) Waxman argues that: "[t]he accepted concept of the Holocaust and the role of collective memory place two demands on the survivor. First they seek to homogenize survivors' experiences, and secondly, they assume that, in adopting the role of the witness, survivors will adopt a universal identity ... testimony is mediated by ... the concerns of collective memory" (pp. 158-159). Where does this "accepted concept" come from? Has it remained unchanged since 1945? If "collective memory" exists, it does so through the interactions of institutions, people, politics, and power--presumably this is what Waxman means when she refers to the "official" forms of Holocaust representation that she mentions in her conclusion (p. 186). In order to argue against the monolithic tendencies of such a "collective memory," however, it is necessary to try to highlight where it comes from.

It is exactly because I agree with Waxman's claim about the importance of historicizing all texts that I find some of her comparisons problematic. For example, she highlights similarities in the messages of some concentration camp reports written after the war in relation to their need to bear witness. She thus makes thematic links between texts published in 1946 and 1997 (p. 78) without any recognition of the intervening fifty years. Further, when writing about how prevailing academic discourses influence the way survivors have framed postwar testimonies, she looks at how the work, for example, of Terrence Des Pres (The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps [1976]) and Martin Gilbert (The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy [1987]) attempted to highlight "something positive about the human spirit" (p. 161). Naming Halina Birenbaum's testimony as a response to this academic discourse, Waxman obscures the fact that Birenbaum's text was published in Polish in 1967 and in English in 1971. Waxman states: "It is not her tattoo that allows Birenbaum to distinguish between good and evil, but the identity of the Holocaust witness and the homogenizing concerns of collective memory that instruct her to seek positive moral insights retrospectively" (p. 162). I am unsure whether Waxman is suggesting that a "collective memory" of the Holocaust exists that spans decades and geographical locations. If so, this would seem to be the very opposite of the notion of "collective memory" as understood by Maurice Halbwachs, to whom she refers in her introduction (p. 2).

Finally, the wide geographical scope of this work gives me pause: "the testimonies featured are written by a wide variety of authors from both Eastern and Western Europe" (p. 2), although, as mentioned above, they are those also available in English translation, which further complicates the discussion in terms of publication dates and contexts. When dealing with such a huge temporal and geographical scope one must necessarily be careful of generalizations. Within a German context, claims about texts published in "Germany" in 1949 always need further specification. Similarly, claims that "Jews who became trapped behind the Iron Curtain were soon prevented from telling the world of their experiences" (p. 105) can be countered by reference to careful histories of the Soviet Occupation Zone and later German Democratic Republic, which show that the picture is always more complicated.[2]

In writing against "the collectivization of Holocaust memory [which] has led to a homogenization of Holocaust comprehension that eschews difficult testimony or stories that fall outside accepted narratives" (p. 186), Waxman's book includes many fascinating and significant aspects that remind us of the need to look again at what the survivors, and indeed those who did not survive, are saying in their testimonies. It also reminds us, however, that we need to think very carefully about the period in which these testimonies were written and what the prevailing conditions were that allowed (or did not allow) them to speak.

Notes

[1]. Karen Remmler, "Gender Identities and the Remembrance of the Holocaust," Women in German Yearbook 10 (1995): 167-187. See also Joan Ringelheim, "Genocide and Gender: A Split Memory," in Gender and Catastrophe ed. Ronit Lentin (London: Zed Books, 1997), 18-33.

[2]. For example, Simone Barck, "Zeugnis ablegen. Zum frühen Antifaschismus-Diskurs am Beispiel des VVN-Verlages," in Verwaltete Vergangenheit. Geschichtskultur und Herrschaftslegitimation in der DDR, ed. Martin Sabrow (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsanstalt, 1997), 259-291.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-german.

Citation: Joanne Sayner. Review of Waxman, Zoë Vania, Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation. H-German, H-Net Reviews. November, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13913

Copyright © 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.