Perec's antelme

French Cultural Studies

Volumn 10, Issue 29, 1999, Pages 161-172

  Stone, Dan ^a  

^a NEW COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 61149234963     PISSN: 09571558     EISSN: 17402352     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/095715589901002902     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. Georges Perec, 'Robert Antelme ou la vérité de la littérature' in L. G. Une aventure des années soixante (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 87-114, here at p. 87. Henceforth referred in the text as RA.
2. Originally published in Partisans, 8 (January-February 1963), 121-34.
3. My article was inspired by and owes a great deal to David Bellos's superb biography of Perec, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, rev. edn (London: The Harvill Press, 1995), henceforth referred to in the text as GP. My thanks to David Bellos, Ann Jefferson and Simon Sparks for commenting on the first draft of this article.
4. On the history of Partisans, see GP, 268-83.
5. Robert Antelme, 'Témoignage du camp et poésie', Le Patriote Résistant, 53 (15 May 1948), 5
6. cited in Annette Wieviorka, Déportation et génocide. Entre la mémoire et l'oubli (Paris: Plon, 1992), 172.
7. Bernd Stiegler, 'Robert Antelme, Das Menschengeschlecht. Erinnerung und Erzählung', in Shoah: Formen der Erinnerung. Geschichte-Philosophie- Literatur-Kunst, ed. by Nicolas Berg, Jess Jochimsen and Bernd Stiegler (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1996), 145.
8. As Annette Wieviorka notes, what is striking about the early survivor testimonies produced in France, is 'l'absence de matrice littéraire.' Annette Wieviorka, 'Indicible ou inaudible? La déportation: premiers récits (1944-1947)', Pardès, 9-10 (1989), 28.
9. The starting point for the discussion is still Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the 'Final Solution' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
10. See also, among many others, Berel Lang (ed.), Writing and the Holocaust (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988);
11. Geoffrey Hartman (ed.), Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994);
12. Omer Bartov, Murder in our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996);
13. Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996);
14. Nicolas Berg, Jess Joachimsen and Bernd Stiegler (eds), Shoah: Formen der Erinnerung. Geschichte-Philosophie-Literatur-Kunst (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1996);
15. Alvin Rosenfeld (ed.), Thinking about the Holocaust: After Half a Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997);
16. Efraim Sicher (ed.), Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998);
17. Dan Stone (ed.), Theoretical Interpretations of the Holocaust (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999).
18. Sarah Kofman, Paroles suffoquées (Paris: Galilée, 1987), 16.
19. Judith Klein claims that survivor testimonies were written because spoken words would not come. See 'Schreiben nach Auschwitz. Die französische Debatte', Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, xliv (2) (1994), 205. Although this might be true for some survivors, the dichotomy between speech and writing is philosophically unsustainable, as Perec implicitly understands when he talks of 'parler, écrire. . .' This split, however, is the site of some confusion, since writers like Kofman and Blanchot, as we will see, use the terms interchangeably; this is empirically dubious, but philosophically defensible.
20. Robert Antelme, L'Espèce humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 9.
21. English edition: The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Marlboro, VT: The Marlboro Press, 1992). Henceforth referred to in the text as EH.
22. Compare Ruth Klüger, Weiter leben: Eine Jugend (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995), 77: 'I once visited Dachau, because American friends wanted to. Everything was clean and orderly there, and one already required more imagination than most people have got in order to picture what occurred there [gespielt wurde] forty years before.'
23. Georges Perec, 'Engagement ou crise du langage' in L.G., 86.
24. Originally published in Partisans, 7 (November-December 1962), 171-81.
25. I am thinking of the immense influence of books like Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).
26. The situation has finally, in the wake of the debate surrounding Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Little, Brown & Co., 1996), begun to change, with more emphasis on the face-to-face nature of much of the killing.
27. See for example Ulrich Herbert (ed.), Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik 1939-1945: Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen (Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 1998).
28. See Wieviorka, Déportation et génocide, especially pp. 161-328 on the early testimonies.
29. Wieviorka, 'Indicible ou inaudible?', 42.
30. See Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, trans. Kevin O'Neill and David Suchoff (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), chapter 2.
31. Originally published as Le Juif imaginaire (Paris: Seuil, 1980).
32. See, for example, GP, 616, on Perec's reluctance to make a film about Ellis Island because it was 'a nostalgic and explicitly Jewish theme.'
33. Also Marcel Benabou, 'Perec's Jewishness', The Review of Contemporary Fiction, xiii (1) (1993), 76-87.
34. Kofman, Paroles suffoquées, 45. Henceforth referred to in the text as PS.
35. Perec, 'Engagement ou crise du langage', 78. This is Perec's summary of Blanchot's thought.
36. Maurice Blanchot, L'Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 198.
37. English edition: The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Henceforth referred to in the text as EI.
38. David Rousset, L'Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Minuit, 1965), 55 and 57. Originally published in Éditions du Pavois, 1946, and winner of the Prix Renaudot the same year. Strikingly, even German books on the subject, such as Eugen Kogon's Der SS-Staat (1946), had more to say about the extermination of the Jews than the typical French book of this period.
39. Finkielkraut, An Imaginary Jew, 32 (Finkielkraut's emphasis).
40. See Jacob Rogozinski, 'Hell on earth: Hannah Arendt in the face of Hitler', Philosophy Today, xxxvii (3) (Fall 1993), 267.
41. In this one is reminded of the attempt by Martin Gilbert to envelop the events of the Holocaust in a philosophy of history which signals a return to normality. After 800 pages of terror, Gilbert ends his book with a more naive celebration of the same sort as Perec's, claiming that 'Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit.' See Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust - The Jewish Tragedy (London: Fontana, 1987), 828
42. and for a critique, Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 162-7.
43. This is work that has been exhaustively undertaken by Bellos throughout GP, and needs no elaboration here.