Lawrence L. Langer – författare

This book is a tribute to the artist's return to his birthplace, to the place of his childhood, once filled with happiness; to the streets of his tenuous survival during World War II, and to the memorial for his grandparents and father. Bak's journey was marked by memories and profound sadness and a great awareness of his responsibility to express the spirits of all who were destroyed during the Holocaust. Scholar Lawrence L. Langer provides commentary on the rich symbolic significance and uniqueness of the artist's work.

In the face of the Holocaust, writes Lawrence L. Langer, our age clings to the stable relics of faded eras, as if ideas like natural innocence, innate dignity, the inviolable spirit, and the triumph of art over reality were immured in some kind of immortal shrine, immune to the ravages of history and time. But these ideas have been ravaged, and in Admitting the Holocaust. Langer presents a series of essays that represent his effort, over nearly a decade, to wrestle with this rupture in human values--and to see the Holocaust as it really was. His vision is necessarily dark, but he does not see the Holocaust as a warrant for futility, or as a witness to the death of hope. It is a summons to reconsider our values and rethink what it means to be a human being. These penetrating and often gripping essays cover a wide range of issues, from the Holocaust''s relation to time and memory, to its portrayal in literature, to its use and abuse by culture, to its role in reshaping our sense of history''s legacy. In many, Langer examines the ways in which accounts of the Holocaust--in history, literature, film, and theology--have extended, and sometimes limited, our insight into an event that is often said to defy understanding itself. He singles out Cynthia Ozick as one of the few American writers who can meet the challenge of imagining mass murder without flinching and who can distinguish between myth and truth. On the other hand, he finds Bernard Malamud''s literary treatment of the Holocaust never entirely successful (it seems to have been a threat to Malamud''s vision of man''s basic dignity) and he argues that William Styron''s portrayal of the commandant of Auschwitz in Sophie''s Choice pushed Nazi violence to the periphery of the novel, where it disturbed neither the author nor his readers. He is especially acute in his discussion of the language used to describe the Holocaust, arguing that much of it is used to console rather than to confront. He notes that when we speak of the survivor instead of the victim, of martyrdom instead of murder, regard being gassed as dying with dignity, or evoke the redemptive rather than grevious power of memory, we draw on an arsenal of words that tends to build verbal fences between what we are mentally willing--or able--to face and the harrowing reality of the camps and ghettos. A respected Holocaust scholar and author of Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, Langer offers a view of this catastrophe that is candid and disturbing, and yet hopeful in its belief that the testimony of witnesses--in diaries, journals, memoirs, and on videotape--and the unflinching imagination of literary artists can still offer us access to one of the darkest episodes in the twentieth century.

In the face of the Holocaust, writes Lawrence L. Langer, our age clings to the stable relics of faded eras, as if ideas like natural innocence, innate dignity, the inviolable spirit, and the triumph of art over reality were immured in some kind of immortal shrine, immune to the ravages of history and time. But these ideas have been ravaged, and in Admitting the Holocaust. Langer presents a series of essays that represent his effort, over nearly a decade, to wrestle with this rupture in human values--and to see the Holocaust as it really was. His vision is necessarily dark, but he does not see the Holocaust as a warrant for futility, or as a witness to the death of hope. It is a summons to reconsider our values and rethink what it means to be a human being. These penetrating and often gripping essays cover a wide range of issues, from the Holocaust''s relation to time and memory, to its portrayal in literature, to its use and abuse by culture, to its role in reshaping our sense of history''s legacy. In many, Langer examines the ways in which accounts of the Holocaust--in history, literature, film, and theology--have extended, and sometimes limited, our insight into an event that is often said to defy understanding itself. He singles out Cynthia Ozick as one of the few American writers who can meet the challenge of imagining mass murder without flinching and who can distinguish between myth and truth. On the other hand, he finds Bernard Malamud''s literary treatment of the Holocaust never entirely successful (it seems to have been a threat to Malamud''s vision of man''s basic dignity) and he argues that William Styron''s portrayal of the commandant of Auschwitz in Sophie''s Choice pushed Nazi violence to the periphery of the novel, where it disturbed neither the author nor his readers. He is especially acute in his discussion of the language used to describe the Holocaust, arguing that much of it is used to console rather than to confront. He notes that when we speak of the survivor instead of the victim, of martyrdom instead of murder, regard being gassed as dying with dignity, or evoke the redemptive rather than grevious power of memory, we draw on an arsenal of words that tends to build verbal fences between what we are mentally willing--or able--to face and the harrowing reality of the camps and ghettos. A respected Holocaust scholar and author of Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, Langer offers a view of this catastrophe that is candid and disturbing, and yet hopeful in its belief that the testimony of witnesses--in diaries, journals, memoirs, and on videotape--and the unflinching imagination of literary artists can still offer us access to one of the darkest episodes in the twentieth century.

"Langer, by the force of scholarship and literary precision rather than dogmatic affirmation and pathos, is one of the few writers, with the exception of significant poets and novelists, who unsettles both our customary language and conceptual instruments. His book is a moral as well as an intellectual act of a very high order." —Geoffrey Hartman, author of The Longest ShadowIn this new volume, Langer—one of the most distinguished scholars writing on Holocaust literature and representation—assesses various literary efforts to establish a place in modern consciousness for the ordeal of those victimized by Nazi Germany's crimes against humanity. Essays discuss the film Life Is Beautiful, the uncritical acclaim of Fragments, the fake memoir by Benjamin Wilkomirski, reasons for the exaggerated importance still given to Anne Frank's Diary, and a recent cycle of paintings on the Old Testament by Holocaust artist Samuel Bak.

The immense service that Langer’s careful, thoughtful, immensely intelligent and restrained study renders is that the esthetics of atrocity cease to be an exclusive domain of the victims.  Many of his writers are not Jewish and several were not imprisoned or interned, and yet all of them have been driven by the death-camp universe.  The atrocity of that time and the atrocities that have succeeded Auschwitz represent a continuity that may almost be called a new tradition, one in which the phantasmagoric and horrific is real and the gentle and generous a prodigy to be remarked with amazement.“The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination is a pioneering work of criticism for it impels us, readers and writers alike, to inquire after the basic paradox: how can literature delight and transfix or warn and modify a humanity from whom nothing is hidden, nothing prohibited, for whom nothing is shocking or unreal.” –Arthur A. Cohen, New York Times Book Review“A stimulating, perceptive study of the literature of the Holocaust…. Langer’s examination of possible stylistic approaches to the subject, from the delicate whimsy of Aichinger to the graphic bestiality of Kosinski’s The Painted Bird is in each case detailed and subtle.” –The New Republic

Winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism  This important an original book is the first sustained analysis of the unique ways in which oral testimony of survivors contributes to our understanding of the Holocaust. It also sheds light on the forms and functions of memory as victims relive devastating experiences of pain, humiliation, and loss.  Drawing on the Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, Lawrence L. Langer shows how oral Holocaust testimonies complement historical studies by enabling us to confront the human dimensions of the catastrophe. Quoting extensively from these interviews, Langer develops a technique for interpreting them as we might a written text. He contrasts written and oral narratives, noting that while survivor memoirs by authors such as Primo Levi and Charlotte Delbo transform reality through style, imagery, chronology, or a coherent moral vision, oral testimonies resist these organizing impulses and allow instead a kind of unshielded truth to emerge, just as powerful in its impact as the visions taking shape in written memoirs. He argues that it is necessary to deromanticize the survival experience and that to burden it with accolades about the “indomitable human spirit” is to slight its painful complexity and ambivalence. Finally he explores the perplexing task of establishing a meaningful connection between consequential living and inconsequential dying, between moral striving and the sprit of anguish and sense of a diminished self that pervades these haunting Holocaust testimonies.

Lawrence L. Langer, perhaps the most important literary critic of the Holocaust, here explores the use of Holocaust themes in literature, memoirs, film, and painting. Among the authors he examines are Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Cynthia Ozick, Art Spiegelman, and Simon Wiesenthal. He appraises the art of Samuel Bak, considered by many the premier Holocaust painter of our time, and assesses the “Holocaust Project” by Judy Chicago. He also offers a critical interpretation of Undzere Kinder, a neglected but important Yiddish film made in Poland after the war about Holocaust orphans. Langer focuses his attention on a variety of controversial issues: the attempt of a number of commentators to appropriate the subject of the Holocaust for private moral agendas; the ordeal of women in the concentration camps; the conflicting claims of individual and community survival in the Kovno ghetto; the current tendency to conflate the Holocaust with other modern atrocities, thereby blurring the distinctive features of each; and the sporadic impulse to shift the emphasis from the crime, the criminals, and the victimized to the question of forgiveness and the need for healing. He concludes with some reflections on the challenge of teaching the Holocaust to generations of students who know less and less of its history but continue to manifest an eager curiosity about its human impact and psychological roots.

The three works considered in Hierarchy and Mutuality in Paradise Lost, Moby-Dick and The Brothers Karamazov display a striking overlap in their concern with hierarchy and mutuality as parallel and often intersecting way of how human beings relate to each other and to divine forces in the universe. All three contain adversarial protagonists whose stature often commands admiration from audiences less ready to confront their motives and deeds than to be swayed by their verbal harangues. Why the quest for personal power should disturb the serenity of mutual love with such compelling force is an issue that Milton, Melville and Dostoevsky address with varying degrees of self-consciousness. In their texts the seeds of disaster seem to sprout in both spiritual and barren soil, sometimes nurtured by a hierarchy that gave them birth, at others in reaction against a hierarchy that would stifle their energy. The purpose of this study is to analyze the origins and the consequences of such tensions.

This book consists of ten essays that examine the ways in which language has been used to evoke what Lawrence L. Langer calls the ‘deathscape’ and the ‘hopescape’ of the Holocaust. The chapters in this collection probe the diverse impacts that site visits, memoirs, survivor testimonies, psychological studies, literature and art have on our response to the atrocities committed by the Germans during World War II. Langer also considers the misunderstandings caused by erroneous, embellished and sentimental accounts of the catastrophe, and explores some reasons why they continue to enter public and printed discourse with such ease.

This book consists of ten essays that examine the ways in which language has been used to evoke what Lawrence L. Langer calls the ‘deathscape’ and the ‘hopescape’ of the Holocaust. The chapters in this collection probe the diverse impacts that site visits, memoirs, survivor testimonies, psychological studies, literature and art have on our response to the atrocities committed by the Germans during World War II. Langer also considers the misunderstandings caused by erroneous, embellished and sentimental accounts of the catastrophe, and explores some reasons why they continue to enter public and printed discourse with such ease.