Fixation, Paralysis, Engulfment
We now mediate the Holocaust through film, archive, writing and testimony but we also mediate this information and filter it with ideas of our own. In ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’ Susan Sontag ponders “on the constant spectacle of other peoples suffering” (Ibid p178) and how it is represented. [In Regarding the Pain of Others Sontag said ‘we can only look; we cannot understand’]. This appears to prelude the idea that a post-photographic world is defined not by the mediums inability to ‘capture’ pain but because it fails to allow us to ‘imagine’ it. We reconcile this illusion of closeness [immediacy] with a distancing that results in our over-familiarity of such images.
Looking back at the debris of history, the ‘Angel’ cannot resist the winds of time, which propel him to the future. [Benjamin]. Marianne Hirsch who has defined post-memory as “a second-generation memory that is belated, secondary, and displaced, a form of cultural memory in tension with personal memory. The guardianship of the Holocaust is being passed down and transferred knowledge of events is being transferred into history [or into myth?]. It is important now, 70 years since the liberation of the death camps to try and enhance our contemporary understanding of these events and the poignancy of the individual narrative that compels us to remember.
Susan Sontag described the moral problem of the ‘educated class’- and to extrapolate, therefore in academic writing also – lies in ‘its failure … of imagination, of empathy’ . [Sontag P7] In his book Theatres of Memory sociologist turned historian Raphael Samuel talks of democratizing memory, of living memory and the memory one inhabits. This conjunction of history and the psyche and of memory as a precondition of human thought, from the ancient Greek, [Mnemossyne : Mnemonics] perhaps involves the science of recollection, of conscious and unconscious memory, what is conscious and comes unbidden to the surface. This Pre-supposes new ways of connecting the past with the present.
So how in the context of Holocaust memory, do we now witness? We can [now] think about certain questions arising from the Shoah with a sense of living connection.” [Ibid]. After the liberation of the concentration camps in Eastern Europe in 1945, given a choice, the last thing the survivors wanted to do was talk about it. [But some did, archival testimony exists of detailed accounts given to those charged with documenting the events in 1945] and survivors began to document and record their experience and memorialising those who didn’t survive. By 1948, Jewish organizations in Poland, Hungary, and Germany had compiled more than 10,000 written testimonies. It wasn’t for some years later in the 1950’s that any serious study of these events and further testimonies of those involved began to be sought.
In Irene Kacandes essay Narrative Witnessing as Memory Work: Reading Gertrude Kolmar’s A Jewish Mother [published in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present] the term narrative witnessing is first used to represent a circuit connecting the original witness [author] their work / text and the present reader. This circuitry and its modes / methods of communication “A story may be written in isolation but to be considered ‘told’ it must be received through the act of reading” [Kacandes p56]. Witnessing then necessitates a listener, a viewer, and a reader. It is a ‘capacious concept’ [Ibid].
Re-conceptualizing the nature of witnessing is certainly not a new phenomenon. H. G. Adler [1910-1988] and W. G. Sebald (1944-2001), present new models of literary testimony and the possibility of a “poetics” after Auschwitz.These examples allow the possibility of a new hybrid paradigm of written, drawn and photographic material about the Holocaust to be constructed. Contemporary thinking on this subject in Witnessing, Memory, Poetics, a collection of essays edited by Helen Finch and Lynn L Wolf [to be published in August 2014] indicate that this new paradigm, being established through the fusing of creative disciplines furthers our understanding of the implications of Holocaust representation.
In my own creative and academic practice this is necessarily not confessional but as an intention to make work by turning inward. Cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead suggested alternative ways of bring new understandings of human behavior to bear on the future and interconnection of all aspects of human life “Anthropology demands the open mindedness with which one should look and listen, and record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have being able to guess”. (Mead p…)