The question of community in Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and After

MLN - Modern Language Notes

Volumn 117, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 858-886

  Trezise, Thomas ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 61149436281     PISSN: 00267910     EISSN: 10806598     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/mln.2002.0067     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. For further biographical information, see Charlotte Delbo, Le convoi du 24 janvier (Paris: Minuit, 1965), 9-22 and 100-02
2. (Convoy to Auschwitz: Women of the French Resistance, trans. Carol Cosman [Boston: Northeastern U P, 1997], 3-13 and 74-76)
3. and Lawrence Langer, Introduction to Auschwitz and After, by Charlotte Delbo, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven: Yale U P, 1995).
4. Le convoi du 24 janvier (see n. 1, above) contains a brief introductory narrative, "Le départ et le retour," followed by biographical portraits (to the extent that this was possible) of all 230 women in the convoy, notes for the most part of lexical and historical interest, as well as photographs and statistical information omitted from the English translation.
5. Charlotte Delbo, Aucun de nous ne reviendra (Geneva: Gonthier, 1965; Paris: Minuit, 1970)
6. Une connaissance inutile (Paris: Minuit, 1970)
7. Mesure de nos jours (Paris: Minuit, 1971);
8. Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven: Yale U P, 1995). The titles of the individual volumes are respectively translated as None of Us Will Return, Useless Knowledge, and The Measure of Our Days. All further references to the trilogy will be noted in the text and will include the volume and page number of the French original followed by the page number of the English translation, which has occasionally been modified. (There exists an earlier English translation of the first volume: None of Us Will Return, trans. John Githens [New York: Grove P, 1968]. ) According to Langer (Introduction, x), the first volume was written in 1946 but withheld from publication until Delbo felt it had stood the test of time, and portions of the second volume were composed in 1946 and 1947.
9. Charlotte Delbo, La mémoire et les jours (Paris: Berg International, 1985);
10. Days and Memory, trans. Rosette Lamont (Marlboro, VT: The Marlboro P, 1990). All further references to this work will be noted in the text and will include the page number of the French original followed by the page number of the English translation.
11. On the cover (as distinguished from the title page), the first word is the name of the series, "Documents," which points beyond the confines of this essay to the controversial status of testimony in relation to history and art. It should also be noted that the general title, Auschwitz et après, did not appear with the first publication of Aucun de nous ne reviendra, but only when this volume was republished in conjunction with Une connaissance inutile and Mesure de nos jours (see n. 3, above).
12. For comparison, see Charlotte Delbo, Qui rapportera ces paroles? (Paris: P. J. Oswald, 1974), a play in which the "nous" is restricted to a group of women and in which it is stated by Françoise, one of the main characters: "Aucune de nous ne reviendra" (18, my emphasis). Note also that in a section of None of Us Will Return entitled "The Men," which has to do with sterilization, Delbo says: "What difference does it make since none of them will return, since none of us will return [Et qu'importe? Puisque aucun d'eux ne doit revenir. Puisque aucun de nous ne reviendra]" (1: 153/96).
13. This term was coined by David Rousset, L'univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Editions du Pavois, 1946).
14. This extension may seem too large, since after all there were significant disparities between and within the camps, and yet too small, since victims of the Holocaust did not include only those deported to camps (one thinks, to cite a single but particularly prominent example, of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the USSR, during which thousands upon thousands of Jews were slaughtered by the so-called Einsatzgruppen, while the Wehrmacht busied itself with murdering Soviet prisoners of war; and one thinks as well, to be sure, of the ghettos). My delimitation of the "us" in this instance is based on Delbo's own thematics of return, which presupposes departure, that is, deportation.
15. The French reads: "Vous, vous pouvez espérer mais nous . . . . " Since the two women otherwise use the familiar singular form of address ("tu"), the "vous" here refers, not to the narrator, but to the group to which she belongs.
16. The "F" meaning French, superimposed on the red triangle worn by political prisoners.
17. Here and in what follows, I cannot do justice to all of these differences, which, again, defined relations no less within than between groups. It is common knowledge, for example, that among Jews arriving at Auschwitz, the old, the sick, and women with children under sixteen were more often than not immediately gassed, and that, between the SS and the mass of prisoners, there existed a whole stratum of "enforcers" (kapos, block and room supervisors, etc. ) representing, as was often true as well of the Jewish Councils and especially the Jewish police in the ghettos, a front line of persecution with respect to their own communities. (In saying this, I do mean to imply that all such enforcers were Jewish or to be dismissive of the difficult position in which they, as well as members and agents of the Jewish Councils, found themselves. ) But the attempt to account for each and every such invidious distinction not only discourages even the most instructive generalization, it exhibits a disquieting formal resemblance to the very administration of the Final Solution. We should also remember that among the most effective weapons wielded by the Nazis was randomness itself, which undermined whatever capacity for self-protective foresight might have been developed by their victims. Whenever we seem to be making sense of the Holocaust, this randomness alone should suffice to restore not only an appreciation of historical contingency, but a sense of humility as well.
18. This future is evoked as well by Primo Levi, who remarks that, in camp slang, "morgen früh" ("tomorrow morning") meant "never" (Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf [New York: Macmillan, 1993], 133).
19. See Susan J. Brison, "Surviving Sexual Violence: A Philosophical Perspective," Journal of Social Philosophy 24. 1 (Spring 1993): 5-22
20. reprinted in her book, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton: Princeton U P, 2002)
21. and Ross Chambers, "Orphaned Memories, Phantom Pain: The Writing of Aftermath," a chapter in his book in progress entitled Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting.
22. I am grateful to Tim Clark and Tom Kavanagh for pointing out that "none of us should [or ought to] have returned" may be construed in this way, for which there is ample evidence indeed in Delbo's trilogy. On the question of survivor guilt, see my "Unspeakable," The Yale Journal of Criticism 14. 1 (2001): 61-62 and n. 45.
23. This is more likely in British than in American usage, although, in either, one would normally expect "none of us was meant to return" to render "aucun de nous ne devait revenir. " Nevertheless, "aucun de nous ne devait revenir" cannot convey the "should" or the "ought to" that is essential to the most obvious reading of "aucun de nous n'aurait dû revenir. " My thanks to Susan Suleiman and Monique Middleton for discussing this with me.
24. Quoted by Langer, Introduction to Auschwitz and After, x, and Lamont, preface to Days and Memory, vii. "Il faut donner à voir" conveys the imperative of making seen or showing, an imperative of which Delbo knew only too well both that its fulfillment is impossible and that this impossibility does not in any way diminish the force of the imperative itself. The expression "donner à voir" is particularly appropriate here given the author's involvement in the theater and the remarkably visual orientation of her testimony. Although Delbo is not frequently given to irony, one might also consider the nature of the "gift" ("don") suggested by "donner. "
25. Delbo demonstrates her awareness of this problem not only in the title of her play Qui rapportera ces paroles? (Who Will Carry the Word?), and in the play itself, whose very form lends itself to a plurality of voices, but also in the third volume of the trilogy, The Measure of Our Days (where, significantly, the first person plural of None of Us Will Return recurs in the possessive "our"). As I remarked at the outset, this volume begins with an account of repatriation and consists thereafter almost entirely of testimonies attributed to fellow survivors. It is Delbo herself - addressed as "vous," that is, as belonging to a group of Frenchwomen repatriated in June of 1945, or as "tu," or even as "Charlotte" - who plays the role of listener, soliciting the speech of other survivors and thus "carrying the word" from witness to reader. Of course, the role of porte-parole is not purely passive and does not imply that the "word" is transmitted without the slightest alteration. The point is rather that, by placing the witness (in this case, the witness of other witnesses) in the text, Delbo insists on what I call, later in this essay, the dialogical relation constitutive of social life, and with it the ethical responsibility for this transmission or, better, this "translation" ("carrying across"). In The Measure of Our Days, she assumes this responsibility specifically with respect to the different ways in which survivors lived the aftermath of the Holocaust. That the third volume of the trilogy, while affirming the dialogical relation just mentioned, nevertheless draws attention to community as a question, is beyond doubt: the statement most frequently quoted from Auschwitz and After is made by Mado (Madeleine Doiret), who concludes her testimony with the words: "I died in Auschwitz but no one knows it [Je suis morte à Auschwitz et personne ne le voit]" (3: 66/267).
26. Survival in Auschwitz, 60.
27. The STO, instituted by the Vichy government, sent some 875,000 French citizens to Germany to work in support of the Nazi war effort. The name "Free French" (Forces françaises libres, or FFL) designated the external military forces under the command of General de Gaulle. The Resistance as a whole assumed, in 1944, the name Forces françaises de l'intérieur (FFI).
28. Henry Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy (Paris: Seuil, 1987);
29. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1991).
30. "Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will" ("A Past That Will Not Pass") is the title of Ernst Nolte's rather notorious article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of June 6, 1986, in which, through a number of implausible and objectionable moves, the author attempts to minimize or displace Nazism's responsibility for the Holocaust. My use of this contextually appropriate phrase does not at all imply agreement with Nolte's views.
31. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins U P, 2001), 41.
32. As LaCapra himself notes, empathy as he understands it can be compared to what Kaja Silverman, in The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), calls "heteropathic identification," in which "emotional response comes with respect for the other and the realization that the experience of the other is not one's own" (LaCapra, 40).
33. I have also not come close to enumerating the ways in which such responses may be motivated. One of the more prevalent motivations for distancing or estrangement (itself a form of denial) is the desire or the need to feel that one's own world remains unscathed and unthreatened by the traumatization of others. This is discussed by Brison ("Surviving Sexual Violence," 11-13) and mentioned by LaCapra (Writing History, Writing Trauma, 41-42). LaCapra also refers to Anne Frank as a figure appropriated for "unearned and incongruous spiritual uplift" (42, n. 51), but one might wish to consider as well another young Jewish Dutchwoman, Etty Hillesum, whose diary makes Frank's look like an exercise in nihilism and is all too easily enlisted in support of a redemptive vision of the Holocaust (and a Christian one, no less) despite the ultimate deportation and death of Hillesum and most of her family in Auschwitz.
34. I would like to add that the response of anyone who, like myself, talks about others' responses to this question, should be held up to the same critical light. While drafting this essay, I could not help but feel uneasy about the discrepancy between its fairly high level of abstraction and the frequency with which Delbo mentions, among other things, lice, diarrhea, and corpses. To what extent is such abstraction itself a form of self-protective denial? Although I do not share the opinion that the awfulness of the Holocaust renders it purely "unspeakable," or that Holocaust Studies amounts to little more than an exploitative academic industry (to which that very accusation, if taken seriously, would make its own contribution), it seems to me that, in its unavoidable inadequacy, the effort to understand and talk about the Holocaust should make one feel uneasy, and that this effort becomes ethically suspect whenever it shows no sign of "empathic unsettlement. "
35. In this passage of La mémoire et les jours, Delbo has just referred to the difficulty of verbally articulating traumatic experience, and then says, as if to reprise the epigraph of Auschwitz et après: "C'est pourquoi je dis aujourd'hui que, tout en sachant très bien que c'est véridique, je ne sais plus si c'est vrai [This is why I say today that while knowing perfectly well that it corresponds to the facts, I no longer know if it is real]. "
36. This dissimilarity becomes rather quickly apparent if one compares the epigraph of Auschwitz and After with that of Convoy to Auschwitz, which reads as follows: "Voici comment tout s'est passé, et jamais je n'invente [This is how it all happened, and I invent nothing]" (7/v). It would be interesting to pursue the implications of Delbo's having quoted, in slightly altered form, the Beggar in Jean Giraudoux's play Electre ("Voici comme tout s'est passé et jamais je n'invente"). For now, I will simply remark that while the "I am certain it is truthful" of Auschwitz and After may resemble the "This is how it all happened, and I invent nothing" of Convoy to Auschwitz, it does so less convincingly when considered in conjunction with the "I am not sure that what I wrote is real," which, as an epigraph for Convoy to Auschwitz, would not be damning so much as puzzling or, as I intimate below, "unconventional. "
37. It should be clear that the testimony or witnessing to which I refer here is not of the kind epitomized by legal depositions (but including documentary historiography), whose very purpose would be defeated if it did not hew as closely as possible to the very norms of discursive transparency that a work like Auschwitz and After calls into question.
38. It bears mentioning that "convention" in the sense of social norm includes strictures defining what it is "appropriate" to say or not to say (as in the French "convenable" and one of the meanings of "convenir"). As Paul Fussell has remarked: "We have made unspeakable mean indescribable: it really means nasty" (The Great War and Modern Memory [New York: Oxford U P, 1975], 170).
39. Although Fussell's claim may appear too sweeping, it points to one of the ways in which Holocaust testimony tends to be "unconventional," as for example in its references to what Terrence Des Pres has called "excremental assault" (The Survivor [Oxford: Oxford U P, 1976], Chap. 3).
40. Trezise, "Unspeakable," 57-58.
41. My use of "identification" is quite similar to LaCapra's: "By identification I mean the unmediated fusion of self and other in which the otherness or alterity of the other is not recognized and respected" (Writing History, Writing Trauma, 27 n. 31).
42. See, in "Unspeakable" (47-51), my critique of Berel Lang's position on Holocaust representation.
43. One may wonder why, toward the very end of this passage, Delbo suddenly shifts to a gendered perspective ("with their children, their wives, their aged parents"). I know of no fully satisfactory answer to this question but would refer the reader to three sections, two in None of Us Will Return and one in Useless Knowledge, all entitled "The Men" (1: 34-36/20-21, 1:152-53/95-96, 2:9-18/117-22). In these sections, Delbo suggests that in some respects, due to their culturally determined social role, the men suffered more than the women. Thus: "If we [women] suffered from seeing them unhappy, hungry, deprived, they suffered even more from no longer being able to protect us, to defend us, to assume destiny on their own" (2: 10/117). The claim need not be construed as invidious, however, since later in "Arrivals, Departures" and elsewhere as well, Delbo alludes, for example, to the especially difficult plight of women with children.
44. In the French original, the effect of first using the word "gare" in reference to Auschwitz-Birkenau is strikingly reinforced by the transition from the common "il y a" ("there is/are"), with which every paragraph of the first part begins, to the literary, quasi-epic "il est" ("Mais il est une gare . . . "). This transition, including the "but" of "But there is a station," represents a major change of kind (from the normal to the exceptional) and of degree ("It is the largest station in the world"). And the stylistic proximity of "il est" to the preterite "il fut" (as in "il fut un temps") not only intimates that, as in the epic, the events recounted here concern an entire people or peoples, it also suggests through the contrast of tenses that, unlike those related by the epic, these events are still very much present.
45. The first thematization of "useless knowledge" in the trilogy occurs in "Arrivals, Departures" (1: 17/8), during the narrative hiatus to which I refer below (see p. 884).
46. It is worth noting that something here is not lost in translation. The ambiguity of the word "every" is perfectly suited to convey both the particularity of "each" and the generality of "all" to which that particularity succumbs. I thank Susan Brison for drawing my attention to this.
47. I draw here on Theodor Adorno's notion of the particular in Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973)
48. and on Emmanuel Levinas's understanding of subjectivity in Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne U P, 1969)
49. and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981).
50. Paul Celan, "Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen," in Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: The Sheep Meadow P, 1986), 35.
51. See Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke vol. 3, ed. Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 186. The German "ansprechbar" can also be translated as "addressable" or "responsive. "
52. Although I focus here on the first person singular, the same can be said with respect to the plural. For the Nazis to allow "the Jews" to say "we" would be to admit of a dialogue between the Jews and themselves, addressed explicitly or implicitly as "you. " And of course they did this, as in the appointment of leaders to represent or speak for the Jewish ghetto communities vis-à-vis Nazi authorities. But then they did it, as we know, as a way of better organizing these communities for deportation and extermination. Moreover, while recognizing the ineradicable distinction between victims and perpetrators, one can also clearly see what is implied by the relational character of self or community on which I insist in these pages, namely, that the annihilation of the other on whom one's own identity depends is, in a certain sense, suicidal. As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it: "The logic of Nazi Germany was not only that of the extermination of the other, of the subhuman deemed external to the communion of blood and soil, but also, effectively, the logic of sacrifice aimed at all those in the 'Aryan' community who did not satisfy the criteria of pure immanence, so much so that - it being obviously impossible to set a limit on such criteria - the suicide of the German nation itself might have represented a plausible extrapolation of the process. Moreover, it would not be false to say that this really took place, with regard to certain aspects of the spiritual reality of this nation" (The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991], 12 [translation slightly modified]).
53. I make a somewhat idiosyncratic or archaic use of the verb "to obliterate," drawing on its etymological sense of a "writing over. " This is not unrelated to its use, in a very different context, by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (see "Obliteration," trans. Thomas Trezise, in The Subject of Philosophy, ed. Thomas Trezise (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993), esp. 95-98. Its main value here lies in indicating the coexistence of the explicit and the implicit.
54. This poem calls to mind a passage from Maurice Blanchot's L'écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), where Blanchot imagines the "parting wish [dernier vceu]" of Auschwitz prisoners to be: "sachez ce qui s'est passé, n'oubliez pas, et en même temps jamais vous ne saurez [know what happened, do not forget, and yet you will never know]" (131, my translation).