Timothy Snyder, In Prose After Auschwitz, I read a poem full of youth and generosity; life moving through love, evil, art and death. It came to me at a time of uncertainty here in America. You sustained a sense of vitality and tragedy in My Shadow Beside Me. Thank you.
This is beautifully written. Permit me to re-enter the Adorno debate (if you will) a different way. Not least because I take it these two recent posts are also intended to be responses. It seems to me that there is a problem with this genre called Holocaust literature. That it is a 'genre' at all. Like so many other literary genres. It therefore takes its place in such a series. It can be incorporated into literature or whatever our notions of literature might be by being placed into one of those canonical boxes we call genres. And therefore contained. Perhaps Adorno was resisting such an economy of genres. Perhaps he did not wish that economy to continue 'after Auschwitz'. Not because he doubted good or great literature could be produced about the Holocaust but that he did not wish for a literature reducible to genre in the usual ways. Because after all every genre codes all kinds of institutional politics. Inasmuch as there is Holocaust literature it too has always already submitted to such institutional hierarchies. It is precisely this last bit that perhaps.. Adorno's remark was directed at. If we should be interrogating all kinds of political or philosophical or bureaucratic or economic (and so on..) histories to try to analyze the Holocaust how can we forget the literary (or indeed any other art form) that bears the mark of these histories as much as anything else?
The Gulag Archipelago has been an enormously importantly, extremely iconic work in this other allied 'field' of gulag literature. These days it's not very provocative (if at all) to claim that a seminal work of journalistic history though it might be it's not necessarily a great artistic work otherwise. The author has of course been that greater artist elsewhere in his work. In fairness his aim here was to document as comprehensively as possible. Nonetheless, more ruthless than the master from Deutschland is the one that is art. The truths of Holocaust literature are in turn also caught in its aesthetic traps as easily as samples from other genres. If we insist on these literary traditions without questioning how they come about or how they are disseminated we also agree to aesthetic categories (Kantian or otherwise) that will have always already contaminated (I use this word with care...) and much in advance the 'truth' of Holocaust writing. Isn't this precisely why Celan moves away from the more obvious rhythms of his earlier work to the almost indecipherable strains of his later period? He produced 'great' works either way, he was enigmatic at each end of the spectrum but the latter might have been more to the point. In that same Adornoian vein. Todtnauberg rather Todesfuge!
To summarize a bit differently it might be that there are deeply affecting works of Holocaust writing that move us in very human ways and because we things about the impossible histories that gave rise to them but that are for all this not the equal of Charles Dickens at his best. I indulge in this somewhat ridiculous analogy to drive home a point. That this is the risk we run if we take the achievements of Holocaust literature as 'given'. I am not at all arguing that such a literature ought to be vacuum-sealed to avoid this possibility. It would be quite impossible to do this in language. How could one possibly not be heir to a language? How could the infections (not only Nazi ones) of this linguistic history not carry over into even the work of the most iconoclastic poet or prose writer, irrespective of his or her intentions? We don't simply switch off the lights and exit the room of language! In this sense Adorno's will always have been an impossible aspiration. In this sense one must even imply terms like 'impossible' and 'barbaric' and so on with great care. At one level these are 'impossible' events to the degree that they exceed any predictive economy of language and politics. But on the other they will always have been extreme possibilities precisely of our everyday language and politics. Otherwise these [events] could not have come about in the first place. Language will have always been equally hospitable to both life and death and indeed fates worse than death.
I do wonder how much a certain genre of 'impossibility' could be multiplied? Not just Holocaust or Gulag literature. One could think of camp literature from China (or about the Cultural Revolution), there is the genre of slave narratives in the US, there is Partition literature in the Indian subcontinent, there is the literature of the Naqba, there could be a literature of people imprisoned in all the refugee camps of the world today on all kinds of borders, there might be one of those constantly drowning in the Mediterranean. 'Impossibility' sadly, tragically, infuriatingly, is always very historical, very normal, very present, very possible. I don't mean to suggest any sort of artificial equivalence among some of these examples (but of course there are countless) I've listed. Even with this catalog of atrocities some fates are indeed worse than others. But for a human life the 'impossible' happens long before it registers on the scale of historian or the theorist of any sort, much less the politician. And in this sense we come full circle to humanism. Modulated differently perhaps, not as complacent a category as before, but still an ideal worth preserving.
The Holocaust cannot not be a genre. But it should not be one. The same for the gulag. The same for.... . If we always wish for the arts to transcend its very specific categories, if art ironically endures through the ages on the condition that it outlive its original contexts, we must be a bit wary of literature that is genre-bound not in the usual ways but because it is tethered to an event. This should be so. And it should not be so. This is the entire problem. A Holocaust poem is great, must be great even if many of its contexts are lost to time. One hopes that the latter never happens but art achieves universality only when those original references are at least forgotten. I don't necessarily share Heidegger's melancholy about this but increasingly I've come to appreciate his wisdom -- that the immediate world of the artwork is always, even definitionally lost over time. Or else it would simply be a dated work.
Will Holocaust literature avoid getting dated? Or will it transcend this history because it has been so profoundly good? I'm not sure what the better answer here is. I would prefer it be the latter, indeed I think it is this... but I would not want to lose the former. Specially not here. Or with the gulag. Or..... .
There is no solution here. Adornoian or otherwise. None. But the question is worth raising. In literature as much as in politics.
I have just received the 2021 edition of 'Here in our Auschwitz and Other Stories' and appreciated your introduction so much. I've actually been stalled, unable to go on to the stories as I sit with your points made in the intro, specifically that immortalizing death by conferring meaning invites more meaningful death and how Tadeusz ultimately came to embrace the Stalinism that terrorized his life only to "escape" after the turns by his newly chosen clan against Mankiewicz and himself. So in the end we are left without neat, tidy explanations of the meaning of the death or solution to governing free people. Erich Fromm's 'Escape from Freedom' (1941) deals with exactly this uncertainty, explaining how escaping this uncertainty has resulted in the systems of empiricism, feudalism, religion, and fascist/communist ideologies as humans desperately seek security and prosperity (not necessarily freedom). I am curious if you think the inability to find an answer- when Stalinism showed its face (again) to Tadeusz, if that could have contributed to his suicide. As someone watching democracy crumble and whose family immigrated here from the Soviet Union, I share the feeling of being disappointed in what you thought was the answer. He fought his whole life for personal freedom then seems to have accepted that wasn't the answer, but couldn't live with that. I'm wondering if Orwell's 1984 is not about Tadeusz, as the story was published in 1949 and Tadeusz joined the Stalinist party Jan 1949. Perhaps this was a common enough occurrence- giving in to the system you spent your life resisting- that they're not connected, but I'm curious how public Tadeusz's journey was and whether it's possible Orwell was writing about him. Lastly, I got this book right as I started reading Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 'Hitler's Willing Executioners' (1996 [thrift store find]) and the whole premise of that book is the idea that "all were complicit," based on the antisemitism and actions of those who carried out the Holocaust. Goldhagen and Tadeusz both resist the temptation to confer nobility and morality to past people and actions just to make themselves and us feel better.
Your introduction gives me the logical and historical tools to make some sense out of the emotions in the writing. Just like your introduction to Havel's 'The Power of the Powerless' (1978; 2018 edition), the way you share information and point to ideas is truly a gift. I've read about six of your books now, including 'Bloodlands' and 'Black Earth', after finding some semblance of comfort and enlightenment in your 'On Tyranny' as the frailties of our country were laid bare. You provide an education in logic, history, and humanity that has brought sense and meaning to my life. And these essays that connect current events to history- and the future- is a light that keeps me going, reminding me that uncertainty, struggle, and conviction are true freedom.
P.S. You did at a talk at a University that was shared online- the one where you stood, because you had a sense that free people should stand- and you shared the poem "The Envoy of Mr. Cogito" by Zbigniew Herbert- I have memorized that poem and it's my meditation mantra.
There are passages in this book over which I’ve lingered. Some I’ve read several times, slowly, and even aloud. The final paragraphs of “The People Who Were Walking” is one such passage. They are essentially a summary of the story:
Human memory retains only images. And today, when I think about the final summer in Auschwitz, I see the endless, colorful crowd of people, ceremoniously heading down one road and the other, the woman standing with her head bowed over the burning ditch, the red-haired girl against the background of the dark interior of that block, screaming at me impatiently:
“Will men be punished? But in a human way, normally!”
And I still see before me the Jew with rotten teeth walking over to my bunk every evening and, lifting his head, asking the same thing:
“Did you get a parcel today? Maybe you’ll sell some eggs for Mirka? I’ll Pay you in marks. She is so fond of eggs . . .” (p. 62)
Hello, Laurie Jurs here from Green Valley, Arizona. What happened to Irka and to Maria? I don't want to read this book but it is my duty to read this book. Thank you Tim Snyder.
Timothy Snyder, In Prose After Auschwitz, I read a poem full of youth and generosity; life moving through love, evil, art and death. It came to me at a time of uncertainty here in America. You sustained a sense of vitality and tragedy in My Shadow Beside Me. Thank you.
This is beautifully written. Permit me to re-enter the Adorno debate (if you will) a different way. Not least because I take it these two recent posts are also intended to be responses. It seems to me that there is a problem with this genre called Holocaust literature. That it is a 'genre' at all. Like so many other literary genres. It therefore takes its place in such a series. It can be incorporated into literature or whatever our notions of literature might be by being placed into one of those canonical boxes we call genres. And therefore contained. Perhaps Adorno was resisting such an economy of genres. Perhaps he did not wish that economy to continue 'after Auschwitz'. Not because he doubted good or great literature could be produced about the Holocaust but that he did not wish for a literature reducible to genre in the usual ways. Because after all every genre codes all kinds of institutional politics. Inasmuch as there is Holocaust literature it too has always already submitted to such institutional hierarchies. It is precisely this last bit that perhaps.. Adorno's remark was directed at. If we should be interrogating all kinds of political or philosophical or bureaucratic or economic (and so on..) histories to try to analyze the Holocaust how can we forget the literary (or indeed any other art form) that bears the mark of these histories as much as anything else?
The Gulag Archipelago has been an enormously importantly, extremely iconic work in this other allied 'field' of gulag literature. These days it's not very provocative (if at all) to claim that a seminal work of journalistic history though it might be it's not necessarily a great artistic work otherwise. The author has of course been that greater artist elsewhere in his work. In fairness his aim here was to document as comprehensively as possible. Nonetheless, more ruthless than the master from Deutschland is the one that is art. The truths of Holocaust literature are in turn also caught in its aesthetic traps as easily as samples from other genres. If we insist on these literary traditions without questioning how they come about or how they are disseminated we also agree to aesthetic categories (Kantian or otherwise) that will have always already contaminated (I use this word with care...) and much in advance the 'truth' of Holocaust writing. Isn't this precisely why Celan moves away from the more obvious rhythms of his earlier work to the almost indecipherable strains of his later period? He produced 'great' works either way, he was enigmatic at each end of the spectrum but the latter might have been more to the point. In that same Adornoian vein. Todtnauberg rather Todesfuge!
To summarize a bit differently it might be that there are deeply affecting works of Holocaust writing that move us in very human ways and because we things about the impossible histories that gave rise to them but that are for all this not the equal of Charles Dickens at his best. I indulge in this somewhat ridiculous analogy to drive home a point. That this is the risk we run if we take the achievements of Holocaust literature as 'given'. I am not at all arguing that such a literature ought to be vacuum-sealed to avoid this possibility. It would be quite impossible to do this in language. How could one possibly not be heir to a language? How could the infections (not only Nazi ones) of this linguistic history not carry over into even the work of the most iconoclastic poet or prose writer, irrespective of his or her intentions? We don't simply switch off the lights and exit the room of language! In this sense Adorno's will always have been an impossible aspiration. In this sense one must even imply terms like 'impossible' and 'barbaric' and so on with great care. At one level these are 'impossible' events to the degree that they exceed any predictive economy of language and politics. But on the other they will always have been extreme possibilities precisely of our everyday language and politics. Otherwise these [events] could not have come about in the first place. Language will have always been equally hospitable to both life and death and indeed fates worse than death.
I do wonder how much a certain genre of 'impossibility' could be multiplied? Not just Holocaust or Gulag literature. One could think of camp literature from China (or about the Cultural Revolution), there is the genre of slave narratives in the US, there is Partition literature in the Indian subcontinent, there is the literature of the Naqba, there could be a literature of people imprisoned in all the refugee camps of the world today on all kinds of borders, there might be one of those constantly drowning in the Mediterranean. 'Impossibility' sadly, tragically, infuriatingly, is always very historical, very normal, very present, very possible. I don't mean to suggest any sort of artificial equivalence among some of these examples (but of course there are countless) I've listed. Even with this catalog of atrocities some fates are indeed worse than others. But for a human life the 'impossible' happens long before it registers on the scale of historian or the theorist of any sort, much less the politician. And in this sense we come full circle to humanism. Modulated differently perhaps, not as complacent a category as before, but still an ideal worth preserving.
The Holocaust cannot not be a genre. But it should not be one. The same for the gulag. The same for.... . If we always wish for the arts to transcend its very specific categories, if art ironically endures through the ages on the condition that it outlive its original contexts, we must be a bit wary of literature that is genre-bound not in the usual ways but because it is tethered to an event. This should be so. And it should not be so. This is the entire problem. A Holocaust poem is great, must be great even if many of its contexts are lost to time. One hopes that the latter never happens but art achieves universality only when those original references are at least forgotten. I don't necessarily share Heidegger's melancholy about this but increasingly I've come to appreciate his wisdom -- that the immediate world of the artwork is always, even definitionally lost over time. Or else it would simply be a dated work.
Will Holocaust literature avoid getting dated? Or will it transcend this history because it has been so profoundly good? I'm not sure what the better answer here is. I would prefer it be the latter, indeed I think it is this... but I would not want to lose the former. Specially not here. Or with the gulag. Or..... .
There is no solution here. Adornoian or otherwise. None. But the question is worth raising. In literature as much as in politics.
I have just received the 2021 edition of 'Here in our Auschwitz and Other Stories' and appreciated your introduction so much. I've actually been stalled, unable to go on to the stories as I sit with your points made in the intro, specifically that immortalizing death by conferring meaning invites more meaningful death and how Tadeusz ultimately came to embrace the Stalinism that terrorized his life only to "escape" after the turns by his newly chosen clan against Mankiewicz and himself. So in the end we are left without neat, tidy explanations of the meaning of the death or solution to governing free people. Erich Fromm's 'Escape from Freedom' (1941) deals with exactly this uncertainty, explaining how escaping this uncertainty has resulted in the systems of empiricism, feudalism, religion, and fascist/communist ideologies as humans desperately seek security and prosperity (not necessarily freedom). I am curious if you think the inability to find an answer- when Stalinism showed its face (again) to Tadeusz, if that could have contributed to his suicide. As someone watching democracy crumble and whose family immigrated here from the Soviet Union, I share the feeling of being disappointed in what you thought was the answer. He fought his whole life for personal freedom then seems to have accepted that wasn't the answer, but couldn't live with that. I'm wondering if Orwell's 1984 is not about Tadeusz, as the story was published in 1949 and Tadeusz joined the Stalinist party Jan 1949. Perhaps this was a common enough occurrence- giving in to the system you spent your life resisting- that they're not connected, but I'm curious how public Tadeusz's journey was and whether it's possible Orwell was writing about him. Lastly, I got this book right as I started reading Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 'Hitler's Willing Executioners' (1996 [thrift store find]) and the whole premise of that book is the idea that "all were complicit," based on the antisemitism and actions of those who carried out the Holocaust. Goldhagen and Tadeusz both resist the temptation to confer nobility and morality to past people and actions just to make themselves and us feel better.
Your introduction gives me the logical and historical tools to make some sense out of the emotions in the writing. Just like your introduction to Havel's 'The Power of the Powerless' (1978; 2018 edition), the way you share information and point to ideas is truly a gift. I've read about six of your books now, including 'Bloodlands' and 'Black Earth', after finding some semblance of comfort and enlightenment in your 'On Tyranny' as the frailties of our country were laid bare. You provide an education in logic, history, and humanity that has brought sense and meaning to my life. And these essays that connect current events to history- and the future- is a light that keeps me going, reminding me that uncertainty, struggle, and conviction are true freedom.
P.S. You did at a talk at a University that was shared online- the one where you stood, because you had a sense that free people should stand- and you shared the poem "The Envoy of Mr. Cogito" by Zbigniew Herbert- I have memorized that poem and it's my meditation mantra.
Thank you for showing us how to be free people.
There are passages in this book over which I’ve lingered. Some I’ve read several times, slowly, and even aloud. The final paragraphs of “The People Who Were Walking” is one such passage. They are essentially a summary of the story:
Human memory retains only images. And today, when I think about the final summer in Auschwitz, I see the endless, colorful crowd of people, ceremoniously heading down one road and the other, the woman standing with her head bowed over the burning ditch, the red-haired girl against the background of the dark interior of that block, screaming at me impatiently:
“Will men be punished? But in a human way, normally!”
And I still see before me the Jew with rotten teeth walking over to my bunk every evening and, lifting his head, asking the same thing:
“Did you get a parcel today? Maybe you’ll sell some eggs for Mirka? I’ll Pay you in marks. She is so fond of eggs . . .” (p. 62)
Mil Gracias Tim Snyder for replying to my Comment asking if you know what happened to Irka and to Maria. Grateful, Laurie Jurs
Hello, Laurie Jurs here from Green Valley, Arizona. What happened to Irka and to Maria? I don't want to read this book but it is my duty to read this book. Thank you Tim Snyder.