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The Ashes Still Burn: Perspectives on the Holocaust
| Article
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11792 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1987 |
5,592 Words |
| Author
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Milton Birnbaum
Milton Birnbaum is dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and
professor of English at American International College in
Springfield, Massachusetts. |
Survivors of the Holocaust to whom I have spoken are generally not eager to listen to lectures, read books, or see movies, plays, and television features on the subject. To them, it is like performing an autopsy on a corpse not yet sufficiently cold for clinical diagnosis. I sometimes feel this sense of discomfort whenever I encounter a new book or a feature in which the agonies of Hitler's victims are resurrected. The news and the number of books about the Holocaust seem to increase as the gap widens between the event and its recollection.
During the first two weeks of December 1986, I noted seven news stories about varied responses to the Holocaust - extreme nationalist groups in West Germany, France, and Switzerland trying to gain popular support by mitigating German responsibility for the Holocaust; pickets carrying placards protesting the "exaggeration" of Holocaust casualties while Elie Wiesel was making his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo; and reports of plans for new museums on the Holocaust. During the same period. I came across several articles discussing three new books about the Holocaust. Two of these - a newly discovered diary and a collection of letters - were written by victims of the Holocaust. The third book, written by Art Spiegelman, whose parents survived the concentration camps, is called Maus: A Survivor's Tale. According to one reviewer, all the people in the book are allegorized as animals: "All Jews are mice. Nazis are cats, Poles are pigs, and non-Jewish Americans are dogs." And the same reviewer comments, "What is amazing is how relentlessly funny he [Spiegelman] makes it all."
If we look beyond literature to the growth in the last few decades of what has been referred to as "the Holocaust Industry," one is mystified by the explosion of Holocaust interest - Holocaust museums and centers in key cities in the world; hundreds of college and university courses in Holocaust literature and allied subjects; innumerable American, European, and Israeli movies, conferences, lectures, documentaries, etc., etc., It overwhelms the mind and soul - and at times, one cries for relief.
And it is not just the sheer quantity that overwhelms; it is also the way in which the subject has been vulgarized and commercialized that is a desecration.
At the 1982 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention, I attended a special session on Holocaust literature. Subsequently, I received two notices in my college mail, each praising the "attractiveness" of a lecture by a survivor of Auschwitz, one of which
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