Table Of ContentHolocaust Fiction and the
Question of Impiety
David John Dickson
Holocaust Fiction and the Question of Impiety
David John Dickson
Holocaust Fiction
and the Question
of Impiety
David John Dickson
Callander, UK
ISBN 978-3-031-12393-1 ISBN 978-3-031-12394-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12394-8
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C
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 Holocaust Synecdoche: Surrendering to the Simplifying
Impulse 23
3 Second-Generation Fiction and the Legacy of the Hinge
Generation 63
4 Visualising the Holocaust: Landmarks, Photographs and
Post-memory 111
5 Contemporary Fiction and Embodied Experience: Feeling
the Holocaust 157
6 Between Irreverence and Impiety: Laying the Foundations
for a Rosean Approach to Holocaust Representation 211
7 Conclusion 255
Index 261
v
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
In contemporary discourse, the term Holocaust Impiety—coined by
Matthew Boswell, though derived from Gillian Rose’s discussion of the
concept of Holocaust Piety in her seminal work Mourning Becomes the
Law: Philosophy and Representation—has come to develop a specific set of
connotations. In Rose’s text, the concept of impiety relates broadly to a
psychological proximity to the perpetrators and victims of the Holocaust.
Pious texts, she argues, adopt a position of “ineffability” and “non-
representability” (Rose, 1996, p. 43), as they do not properly humanise
and contextualise the victims of the event, and nor do they wish to provide
insight into the psychology that drives those perpetrating the atrocities.
Instead, pious texts tend to opt for simple moral binaries. As Boswell puts
it: “Holocaust piety admits only to the clarities of the courthouse: to guilt
and innocence, to crime and punishment” (Boswell, 2012, p. 158). To
elucidate this, Rose uses the example of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List
(1993), which she views as the archetypal example of Holocaust piety.
Spielberg’s film does not provide depthful and complex portraits of its two
principal characters, Oscar Schindler and Amon Goeth, but rather pro-
vides two abstract embodiments of good and evil. Rather than creating a
sense of continuity between “the banality of Schindler’s benevolence and the
gratuity of Goeth’s violence” and suggesting that these two men, given
their similar origins as Austrians from “undistinguished families”, may eas-
ily reverse their positions, the film instead opts to represent Schindler as a
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2022
D. J. Dickson, Holocaust Fiction and the Question of Impiety,
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2 D. J. DICKSON
“demi-God” (Rose, 1996, p. 46; p. 47) and Goeth as an unapproachably
insane lunatic. Pious texts, as Rose puts it, aim to “mystify something that
we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understand-
able, all too continuous with what we are—human, all too human” (Rose,
1996, p. 43). In short, therefore, the core tenet of Rose’s understanding
of Holocaust impiety is the notion that the Holocaust must not be viewed
as an untouchably, incomprehensibly singular event outside of the realm
of human understanding. Instead, impious texts must make the psychol-
ogy of the victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust understandable. Rose
particularly praises Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day, for
instance, for its capacity to illustrate the creeping influence of fascist ideol-
ogy in a way that resonates particularly with the reader. By illustrating the
butler Stevens’s slow corruption, as his values slowly shift and his under-
standing of dignity is reframed towards “unstinting service” to his master,
the book promotes a “crisis of identity” (p. 52; p. 46) in the reader. By
this, Rose means that the reader is forced to confront their own potential
susceptibility to certain forms of political influence, which not only height-
ens our present-day sense of engagement with the Holocaust—as we are
forced to ask ourselves how we might have fared in certain political con-
texts—but also once again reasserts that the Holocaust is not to be
regarded as an unreachably singular event. We must not regard the
Holocaust as something incomprehensibly sacred, as figures such as Elie
Wiesel and Claude Lanzmann have in the past—indeed, Lanzmann has
previously asserted that there is an “absolute obscenity in the project of
understanding” (Lanzmann, 2007, p. 51)—instead, we must counter the
depthless sentimentality of the vast majority of mainstream Holocaust fic-
tion with works that vividly bring to life the victims and perpetrators of the
Holocaust.
This, at least, is the strictly Rosean definition of Holocaust Impiety.
Subsequent articulations of impiety, from Matthew Boswell’s profoundly
influential work on the subject to Joost Krijnen’s Holocaust Impiety in
Jewish American Literature, have fundamentally reshaped the concept to
focus instead on anything that violates certain representational norms.
Building on Terrence des Pres’s essay on ‘Holocaust Laughter?’, both
texts outline a representational baseline that come to typify works of
Holocaust Piety. These qualities are as follows:
1 INTRODUCTION 3
1. The Holocaust shall be represented in its totality as a unique event,
as a special case and kingdom of its own, above or below or apart
from history.
2. Representations of the Holocaust shall be as accurate and faithful as
possible to the facts and conditions of the event, without change or
manipulation for any reason—artistic reasons included.
3. The Holocaust shall be approached as a solemn or even a sacred
event, with a seriousness admitting no response that might obscure
its enormity or dishonour its dead. (Des Pres, 1988, p. 217)
These three core representational tenets, therefore, can be summarised
as uniqueness, historical faithfulness and an appropriate solemnity that
honours the dead and maintains their essential sacral dignity. Operating
under this conception, Boswell and Krijnen effectively reframe impiety to
refer to any work that violates these representational principles.
Boswell’s operating definition of impiety, it may be argued, is both
multifaceted and hard to define. While he begins by citing Rose, and does
regard as impious works that aim to approach and comprehend the psy-
chology of perpetrators and victims, he also states that he wishes to chal-
lenge Rose’s “conservatism” regarding works that are defined by their
“representational excess” and “historical irreverence” (Boswell, 2012,
p. 3). Boswell’s expanded definition of impiety, therefore, comes to
encompass works that strike out “against ineffability and silence through
vividly realistic representations of the killing and degradation that took
place” (pp. 3–4). This is a radical departure from a Rosean conception of
impiety. Boswell has come to conflate the concepts of ineffability and
silence with a Lanzmann-esque desire to avoid the representation of the
Holocaust’s central horrors. He explicitly cites Lanzmann’s belief that a
“circle of flames” traditionally surrounds the representation of death in
the gas chamber, as the “absolute horror” of the experience “cannot be
transmitted” (Lanzmann, 1979, p. 139) due to the logical impossibility of
this event being historically witnessed. As Lanzmann notes, no one who
entered the gas chamber “came back among us to testify” (p. 139) and so
any attempted representation of the event is liable to be both transgressive
and trivialising. Boswell staunchly disagrees, and asserts that the graphic
portrayal of the “killing process” in works such as Tim Blake Nelson’s The
Grey Zone (2001) and Uwe Boll’s Auschwitz (2011) allows the extermina-
tionist machinery of the Holocaust to “tell its own story” (Boswell, 2012,
p. 163). For Boswell, these graphic recreations of Holocaust horror are
4 D. J. DICKSON
impious as they strike out against the anti-representational pieties of fig-
ures like Lanzmann. To avoid these depictions, Boswell implies, would be
to surrender to silence. In addition to this, Boswell also asserts that
Holocaust laughter, and specifically texts that take a “breezy and irrever-
ent attitude to the Nazi genocide”, represent the “polar opposite” of the
“silence and respectfully ‘lowered eyes’” (p. 22) demanded by more con-
ventionally pious approaches to the subject. In this, he includes Emily
Prager’s Eve’s Tattoo, a text that will be addressed in more detail in Chap.
3. Continuing with the trend of solemnity and sacredness, Boswell also
identifies texts that violate the dual pieties that “suffering ennobled the
victims” of the Holocaust and that “the historical memory of this suffer-
ing is inherently meaningful” (p. 128) as being inherently impious. By this
logic, anything that takes a comparatively irreverent approach to the vic-
tims of the Holocaust, and regards them as anything other than secular
saints, now falls within Boswell’s expanded definition of impiety.
Cumulatively, therefore, we may see that Boswell’s conception of impiety
includes many interrelated elements that stretch the concept far beyond its
Rosean origins. An impious text, according to his conception, is no longer
one that simply humanises and demystifies the victims and perpetrators of
the Holocaust. Instead, the term may now be applied to any work that
approaches the subject without a sense of reverential seriousness or that
may, in certain cases, seek to represent the unrepresentable by focusing on
graphic depictions of mass extermination.
This expansion, or indeed dilution, of the concept of Holocaust Impiety
is further compounded by Joost Krijnen, who borrows from Boswell’s
interpretation of the term while omitting nearly every element that may be
traced back to Rose. While Rose’s definition of Holocaust Piety is cited
once in Krijnen’s text, his working definition of impiety is clearly derived
from Boswell. As Krijnen puts it, an impious text is one that flouts the
“conventional” norms relating to the representation of the Holocaust, by
“using genre conventions and styles that at first seem wholly incongruous
with the tragic reality of this history” (Krijnen, 2016, p. 6). This includes
works that approach the Holocaust “playfully and comically”, such as the
Holocaust Lego sculpture crafted by Zbigniew Libera and the “toy-like
miniature scenes from Auschwitz” by David Levinthal, and those that pres-
ent the history of the Holocaust in “self-consciously unorthodox and flex-
ible ways” (p. 8; p. 5; p. 123). In this latter point, Krijnen is referring to
texts that do not adhere strictly to the history of the Holocaust, but rather
seek to present alternate histories that some may consider provocative. The
1 INTRODUCTION 5
Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon is therefore viewed as being
doubly impious as it not only violates established expectations regarding
the Holocaust and genre fiction—it is relatively uncommon, after all, for a
Holocaust novel to take the form of a “Chandlerian crime novel”—but it
also seeks to provoke through the creation of a “purely fictional Jewish his-
tory” (p. 132; p. 133). It imagines a world in which the Holocaust was
only partial and so, in the strictest sense, it violates our established pieties
regarding historical faithfulness. Indeed, both of these deviations can be
said to stray away from Des Pres’s list of established Holocaust pieties—a
list with which Krijnen is intimately familiar, as he references it explicitly in
an early chapter of his book, describing it as a “still unsurpassed and highly
‘impious’ analysis of the comic in Holocaust literature” (p. 70).
In short, Krijnen’s working definition of Holocaust Impiety may be
read as a selective extrapolation of certain elements that are present in
Boswell’s text. The key difference lies in their competing perspectives
regarding the essential reachability of the Holocaust. Boswell does not
entirely abandon Rose, providing readings of Lanzmann’s Shoah and Tim
Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone that are inflected with the desire to under-
stand the past—to place oneself in the shoes of the victims and perpetra-
tors of the Holocaust. As Boswell notes, Shoah demonstrates Lanzmann’s
clear desire to form a greater understanding of the Holocaust past by fas-
tidiously retracing the steps of the victims and through the intense inter-
rogation of survivors in the film’s post-war present. Lanzmann’s camera,
Boswell highlights, is astonishingly literal in its approach and frequently
acts out the actions being described by the interviewees. During Michaël
Podchlebnik’s description of the extermination process at Chelmno, for
instance, Lanzmann’s mobile camera van follows precisely “the same route
taken by the gas vans” (Boswell, 2012, p. 152). This represents a clear
desire to follow in the footsteps of the Holocaust dead, and the literal act-
ing out of this journey partially serves to elide the temporal gap that sepa-
rates Lanzmann in the present from the Holocaust past. Similarly, the
manner in which Lanzmann “continuously interrupts” his interviewees to
“probe for specific details and to examine states of feeling” suggests “that
he, too, is driven by the need to put himself in their subject positions”
(p. 27). Lanzmann is able to approach the emotional turmoil that Abraham
Bomba felt, for instance, when cutting hair in Treblinka by finally forcing
an emotional confession during their staged interview in a barbershop in
Tel Aviv. This represents something approaching Rosean impiety, as
Lanzmann has come to better understand the emotional reality of existing
