I. BADENHEIM 1939: ANNIHILATED BODIES

Where are these dead? In a memorable scene from Badenheim 1939, a novel by Aharon Appelfeld, several fictive Jews gather at the home of two fictive ladies of the evening, long-time and beloved residents of a fictional European resort. The characters improvise a small party on the last night in Badenheim before their forced departure to Nazi-occupied Poland. Poised on the brink of their extermination in one of the death-camps and yet surreptitiously conspiring to remain ignorant of their fate, these fictional characters spend an evening celebrating this small bit of life they must leave behind:

Every word that was said aroused her laughter. “Why are you laughing?” asked Sally.

“For no reason. Just because people make me laugh.”

But the liqueur did not bring gaiety. The people sank deeper into the armchairs. The light from the lamps poured onto the floor as from a broken tube. The colored wall, adorned with reproductions, seemed to come alive: it was as if dormant veins had started to throb in it. Nocturnal shadows slunk against the windows and a fat fly beat against the screen. If there were any words left they belonged to Salo. But Salo did not speak. A kind of smile split open on his forehead. An evil smile, smeared there with poisonous paint.

The lights grew dimmer, and delicate sounds invaded the room from outside. It seemed that the country parlor was already living a life of its own, a life without people.

“The emigration procedures seem very efficient—very efficient indeed, if I may say so,” said Dr. Pappenheim.

(150)¹

In this passage, the narrator's voice recounts the dissolution of bodies, their transformation into silence, into nothingness, long before their arrival at those death-camps where they would be summarily slaughtered and burned or covered over with earth until they disappeared with an entirety that is still difficult to imagine. Indeed, even the shadows playing across the windows of this cozy scene have more substantiality than the human bodies that remain undescribed and sinking like phantoms into their respective armchairs. All about them the world blossoms in lurid fecundity—even the room grows veins and assumes a life of its own, one “without people.”

For Badenheim's narrator precisely these human bodies conversing on this quiet evening will be annihilated and so cannot in retrospect appear in the scene recorded above. In spite of the consistent appeal to description (although often laconic and fragmented) which characterizes the style of the narration, the contours of bodies, their weight and textures, are uniformly lacking throughout the novel. True, cigarettes are smoked, food is smacked upon, skull caps are worn, chairs are sunk into, but nowhere (or almost nowhere and the exceptions most often prove the rule) does the body become palpable either to the vision or touch of the narrator. Instead the narrator speaks of how the people of Badenheim “sink into themselves,” how their forms “hug the walls like shadows,” even as the things of the village, its fountains and rooms, its trees and lights are imbued with an hallucinatory quality, precisely because their evocation is so vivid, so couched in what must be inferred to be the sensuous, bodily awareness of the narrator.

That the bodies of those who are soon to be exterminated pale beside the place in which they reside holds the implicit acknowledgement of the narrator that he cannot report to the reader who those bodies actually were. The commemoration of Auschwitz confronts those who would remember the body of the deceased with that peculiar death which is in fact no death at all but an annihilation, i.e. in which the body is not only murdered but disappears from the memory of all those who would have mourned it—disappears, because not only the deceased dies, but all those who would have remained to name the deceased, to linger with his or her memory “in a mode of respectful solicitude,” have also disappeared (Heidegger 282).² Like the fictional narrator, we non-fictional readers seek to remember the dead whose bodies have disappeared because not only the bodies but also the memories of those bodies were annihilated.

Yet, even as the body's substantiality evades the grasp of the narrator's voice, descriptions of faces proliferate. Everywhere within Appelfeld's novel faces appear and speak but as faces without bodies, i.e. the faces of shadows, of ghosts. These are the faces of the once-living, brought into the world of fiction, but a fiction seeking to memorialize the non-fictive dead of a non-fictive event, the Shoah, the Holocaust, die Endlösung. Thus, the faces of Badenheim are the faces of ghosts—but ghosts of whom it can now be said that even when they lived they already lacked a body, i.e. lacked the possibility of being remembered by other bodies who would survive and carry on the virtual body of the deceased. The faces of Badenheim are then less openings into the body's flesh, its life, and more the mask of a nothingness which has slowly encroached upon the body, eating away its vitality, its life, its expectation to be remembered. Salo's face, which no longer speaks but is “split open” by a “kind of smile,” one “smeared there with poisonous paint,” serves as the perfect icon for that conversation on the eve of deportation in which the excuse that one laughs “for no reason,” only seeks to cover over the horror of one's accelerating disappearance.

A face such as Salo's finds a horrifying counterpart in the face of Trude, who at the novel's beginning, before the arrival of the faceless Sanitation Department (whose job is to surreptitiously organize the Jews for shipment to Auschwitz), is haunted by hallucinations, entirely consumed with the memory of her dead parents and close to death herself. As a continually repressed but growing horror overwhelms the occupants of the resort, as they begin to appeal to any fabrication, any diversion, to escape the confrontation with the annihilation that the increasingly constricted and peculiar nature of their imprisonment portends, Trude regains her health and becomes a seer, one whose stories of the fabulous land of the Poland of her childhood now become a source of hope for her husband. The narrator comments: “When she spoke about Poland her eyes lit up, and the sorrow was erased from her brow. A new, young skin seemed to be growing over her face. She laughed” (118). Here again, the laughter of willed illusions, this time imbued with a growing health reserved only for the face of that one for whom the pathology of diversion and fabrication has become the very mode of her existence. A savage irony permeates such a reversal.

The faces of Badenheim are affixed to bodies whose future is in the process of collapsing, i.e. to bodies whose expectations are becoming so confused within a maze of diversions and dissemblances, that even as the form of expectation continues, even as Trude chatters on about Poland and the Nazis hang up posters advising the Jews of the appealing nature of Slavic culture, expectation altogether ceases to exist. But the collapse of expectation does not end with these illusions, with the inconsequential conversations of the moment (and one here is reminded of Heidegger's notion of “idle talk”) that dominate the life of Badenheim. We who read in the wake of their disaster are only too aware that what the inmates of Badenheim seek to deny is far more terrible than they could have ever formulated. The narrator's descriptions continually appeal to the reader to compare her or his retrospective knowledge of Auschwitz to the pretense of expectation that the characters enact. To speak of Salo's face as split open by a smile is to lead the reader to remember that even as Salo sat in his chair, he will already have been extinguished, that for his Nazi captors he had already become no more than a vermin to be disposed of, a poisonous, sub-human thing whose face was less a face than an orb split by the opening of the mouth. We who read now are reminded again and again of that which we would be all too happy to deny: since the bodies of the Jews of Badenheim lived in a world without a future in which one's presence will have been remembered, the thought of their having been a body ceased and ceases to be meaningful.

Thus, the narrative strategy of Appelfeld suggests that the collapse of memory leads to the collapse of embodiment, that he or she who lives after Auschwitz might seek to remember its victims but is so removed, so distanced from these annihilated bodies, that the account of their death must become a fiction, an imagining of bodies emptied of their palpability.

But let one be clear here about what is meant by the collapse of memory. It would be silly to suggest that a meaningful death requires that specific survivors be able to recite a chronology of one's important achievements, of one's central conflicts, of one's embarrassing failures. Rather, memory implies that there will be survivors, i.e. other bodies, whose memories serve as sites for the introjection of the dead person's body. In this way, the bodies of the living carry on the body of the other past his or her death. Such a memory is not simply the story one tells about the other, but more importantly the capability of telling that story, since the other has in some manner become a part of one's own body. It is such bodies that the retrospectively “dead” of Badenheim lack—their memory is impoverished, a merely literal memory, a memory of words written and read by we who know what happened to these others and who empathize with their plight but fail to have any access to that plight beyond the poiesis, the making of a fictive body, a body's exemplar.

On the other hand, the perhaps not fictive bodies of those who might have actually died at the end of that fateful train ride from Badenheim to the promised land of Poland are no longer palpable, because they are no longer and never were remembered palpably. But again one must be clear about what the palpable is. After all, the bodies of the normally dead, of those dead by whom, in Heidegger's formulation, we might “linger” [Verweilen],³ are also in the process of losing their palpability (282). The surface of the corpse immediately begins to decompose, is immediately without response and no longer is hooked into the circuit of touching/touched, of seeing/seen that would characterize the flesh of Merleau-Ponty's rewriting of Heideggerian ontology. How then can one argue that the dead remain palpable and that precisely the loss of this palpability is what makes Badenheim so monstrous, so unimaginable?

II. MOURNING: SOME THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

But the corpse is not the only aspect of the body which finds its place in the act of mourning—there is also, as Freud himself suggests (in both “Trauer und Melancholie” and later with greater emphasis in “Die Zerlegung der psychischen Persönlichkeit”⁴) the body of the survivor, of he or she who mourns. This body serves as the site of an introjection, what Freud called “identification” [Identifizierung] in which the ego finds itself adjusting to the lost “other” [ein Fremdes] so that it “behaves as the other, imitates it, so to speak absorbs it” (“Die Zerlegung” 69). In the interpretation of Freud offered here,⁵ memory is the othering of the body, the assertion of what Freud would call “die gesonderte Existenz” (“Die Zerlegung” 65), the split existence, of the ego-body, in which psychic surface folds over against psychic surface and so finds itself other to itself, away from itself, duplicitous.⁶ In the body of the dead enfolded within the body of the survivor, in the gestures and habits, the memories and emotive responses that the deceased instigated, modelled, inscribed, the body of the deceased remains palpable and survives its own death. Such a body becomes the gift of the deceased, an important, if not essential, part of his or her ethical bequeathal to succeeding generations.

This aspect of the body of the deceased, the body introjected, is lacking in our memory of the small group of not quite fictive bodies that populated not quite fictive Badenheim. Insofar as Badenheim is fictive, it becomes an exemplar, a generalization of experience in which the very palpability of memory has disappeared. This is the Badenheim that the reader knows, even before he or she reads this novel, i.e. Badenheim 1939 as the exemplar for the historical Auschwitz and the other death-camps where so many millions of humans, in Primo Levi's words, filed into “nothingness” (Survival in Auschwitz 49).⁷ Indeed without this knowledge, in which public memory does its best to commemorate the horror of Auschwitz, the devastating ironies of the novel that rely upon an implied second level of privileged knowledge in the reader disappear. Yet to read Badenheim 1939 requires that one at least desires to resist the fictive nature of these bodies and to attempt the impossible, namely, to linger mournfully alongside the corpses of these deceased who have left no palpable memory behind. In pursuit of this impossible task, what the reader encounters is not memory but the ghost of memory, i.e. a memory that is stunned, questioned, made uneasy by its incapacity to remember palpably, to remember bodily.

If the narrator is unable to mourn, if these bodies disappear beyond memory, Appelfeld's gesture of remembering that one cannot remember seems futile. Nevertheless, precisely the futility of this gesture and the uneasiness it engenders within those who come after Auschwitz comprises the only act of memory that might address the loss of those who have disappeared.

In coming to this realization, one is brought to distinguish between two dimensions of mourning the dead, one of which has collapsed but the other of which continues in the wake of those who disappeared at Auschwitz. The ontological dimension of mourning, in which the memory of the dead serves as a profound psychic inheritance helping to engender the self of the living, no longer is possible when the very survivors who would have benefited from such memories have also disappeared. But the mourning of the annihilated of Auschwitz also possesses an ethical dimension in which the living respond to the evidence that annihilation has occurred. Such evidence functions as indexical⁸ rather than palpable memory insofar as it points out that the annihilated suffered and that their suffering cannot become one's own, no matter how ardently one cares for those who have disappeared. Badenheim 1939 assumes that the reader has already confronted such indexes of annihilation, that he or she has seen pictures or at least heard accounts of burnt out synagogues, of crematoria, of numbers tattooed on skin, of piles of shoes, of walls pockmarked with bullet holes, of mass-graves where the ashes of a thousand bodies are buried in a space no larger than a house garden. By keeping such indexical memories of Auschwitz in mind, the reader of Badenheim's narrative gains that ironically doubled vision discussed earlier in which the massive loss during the Holocaust of palpable memory, of a memory that would have engendered a new generation, gains some significance.

Indexical memories are important in any death. For this reason, a tombstone, a photograph, various effects, a room where he or she once slept, become important indicators that the dead who once existed are no longer living. The remembrance of the dead must also address and be addressed by the impossibility that one's memory can ever bring the dead back to life. In doing so, the living recognize that their benefit, their inheritance, comes precisely by means of what the dead have lost. One's memory may honor the dead but the otherness of the dead remains. The dead of Auschwitz, even more than the dead of more normal times, sink into a past from which they cannot return and so trouble those who mourn, those who remain after to ponder the dead.

Freud gives an important hint as to the nature of such uneasiness, insofar as he links the first emergence of alienation in the life of the personality with the development of the super-ego. If one reads Freud carefully on the mode of its development, one finds that such alienation is first experienced not through identification with the other but through a loss of the other—a loss whose trace consisted in the formation of a conscience, a structure of identification which itself disrupted the projects of the ego with the claim of the other. In this disruption, the pleasure principle is “dethroned” and replaced with the “reality-principle,” in which the otherness of the “outerworld” and its inhabitants must be continually reconfronted and reassessed (“Die Zerlegung” 82). In this loss that provokes the first instance of identification, a disturbance in the life of the person is announced whose effect was only provisionally accommodated in the super-ego and whose final accommodation escapes the project of identification at every turn. One can conclude that the irrevocability of loss is assumed throughout Freud's account of mourning, although its thematization is always tempered by the activity of the ego to recoup as much as possible from such loss.

Freud argues in his “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death”⁹ that the ethical project of the self is the result of a long and unfinished evolutionary development which is repeatedly provoked by the self's confrontation with exteriority and the loss it implies:

The influences of civilization cause an ever-increasing transformation of egoistic trends into altruistic and social ones by an admixture of erotic elements. In the last resort it may be assumed that every internal compulsion which makes itself felt in the development of human beings was originally, that is, in the history of mankind, only an external one. Those who are born today bring with them as an inherited organization some degree of tendency (disposition) towards the transformation of egoistic into social instincts, and this disposition is easily stimulated into bringing about that result. A further portion of this instinctual transformation has to be accomplished during the life of the individual himself. So the human being is subject not only to the pressure of his immediate environment, but also to the influence of the cultural history of his ancestors.

(282–83)

The ethical dimension of human existence, the acknowledgement of the other, is not inborn but occurs through the building up of “civilized behaviors and insights” which in turn are imparted from one generation to the next in the development of a conscience within the organism, of which the establishment of the super-ego is only the first tentative step. Such a conscience is fragile, precisely because it sets itself at odds with the self's more “natural” tendencies in the dawning recognition of the other's exteriority. Thus, Freud argues that the ethical strivings of human beings are provisional in nature—they are secured only insofar as individuals or the culture in which the psyche is fostered work to adapt the psyche or the various cultural institutions surrounding it to the address of the other. There is no ideal ground for ethics, no innate predisposition that brings the self to the other. Rather, the other interrupts the predispositions of the id for anonymous pleasure and questions its universal drive for satisfaction. It is this very interruption which brings the self into existence. Freud argues that the lack of any ideal ground for ethics makes the ethical achievement of any culture all the more significant.

The vulnerability of the dead of Badenheim 1939 to annihilation, to the loss of their palpable memory, is a disturbing reminder that without the sustained struggle of humans to respond to others, to live ethically, the very possibility of a death in which one will give over one's memories for the good of others disappears. After Auschwitz, one not only mourns the disappearance of the dead, but also the disappearance of death itself. In the wake of such a disappearance, one becomes aware of the vulnerability of any ethical activity to the assault of those who would turn human beings into mere things to be used or to be disposed of as need requires.

III. THE ALTERITY OF THE DEAD

But this otherness of other humans, this exteriority beyond what can be remembered palpably, remains to be thought with greater radicality. In pursuing such a thinking, Emmanuel Levinas speaks of the “alterity” of the other as transcending one's own being with a finality that resists all mediation. Such a transcendence leads to an exterior that is absolutely other and outside any Hegelian notion of the play of transcendence within immanence.

A return to the faces of Badenheim 1939 will help one to better understand what this absolute transcendence of the other might signify. It was discussed above that for the narrating voice the faces of the doomed Jews had become the faces of ghosts, faces already emptied of their futures by the violence of the Nazi attack upon them. But this vision of the face is itself an ironical gesture that confronts the reader with the horror of annihilation insofar as it is not resisted, insofar as it succeeds. This horror finds its narrative expression in the degradation of the face, a degradation that in turn is only meaningful insofar as the reader keeps in mind yet another vision of the face, one in which the face is respected and its annihilation resisted.

This implied, respectful vision of the face, the vision brutally repressed in the inhuman world of Badenheim but everywhere at work in its narrator's irony, demands further reflection. In this vein it would be helpful to turn to Levinas who also speaks of the face of one's fellow human but a face confronted in one's respect for it rather than degradation of it. Such a face witnesses an infinite difference from one's own being, a difference that cannot be overcome, even in the bliss of a mystical or erotic union. No matter how much one studies the Levinasian face of the other, how minutely one charts its expressions and the desires and emotions that such expressions unfold, the face remains essentially mysterious, signifying an otherness beyond any similarity.

To be sure, the other is exposed to all my powers, succumbs to all my ruses, all my crimes. Or he resists me with all his force and all the unpredictable resources of his own freedom. I measure myself against him. But he can also—and here is where he presents me his face—oppose himself to me beyond all measure, with the total uncoveredness and nakedness of his defenseless eyes, the straightforwardness, the absolute frankness of his gaze.

(“Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity” 55)¹⁰

Before this gaze of the other, the self has no recourse. One can choose to kill the other, to deny the other's alterity and in some way appropriate the other for one's own “good.” But the alterity of the other remains untouched. One has not suffered the other's suffering nor died the other's death. For Levinas, to confront the face responsibly is to be given a sign of the other's vulnerability to one's own powers, a particular vulnerability that is not one's own but that one is already commanded by. In this recognition, the self is called to renounce the priority of the good, i.e. priority of the expectation of one's fulfillment. Edith Wyschogrod argues, “The relation with the other does not make us happy; it puts the self into question, empties the self of itself” (86).¹¹

In the spirit of Wyschogrod's observation, the faces of the fictive Jewish residents of Badenheim do not make its reader happy but question him or her in a most disturbing manner. In Badenheim, one reads of the collapse of ethical respect for the annihilated of Auschwitz fictively and in the past tense; unable to rescue the faces of those who actually were annihilated, one summons up the simulacra of such faces in order to remember the outrage, the horror of an annihilation that can never be mourned since the palpable memory of the annihilated disappeared in the very wake of their annihilation. This remembrance of the collapse of memory troubles the reader and challenges him or her to resist that act of indifferent annihilation that so profoundly attacked the integrity of the face, the vulnerability of its gaze. Thus, even though these faces have been lost, their loss remains an outrage that calls upon the reader to respond to them, to the annihilated. In this way, the reader resists annihilation by remembering the vulnerability of the face to the rape of genocide. Yet, the reader's response can only emphasize his or her impotence in regard to changing the situation of the annihilated. Their palpable memory cannot be restored to them; their survivors have also disappeared.

The collapse of palpable memory after the Holocaust radicalizes what was already an element of mourning. In more normal times, mourning is already a relationship marked by a difference in which the “irreversible” past uncovered by the dead resists the survivor's attempt to ingest and digest its otherness (Levinas, “La Trace de l'autre” 199).¹² This resistance of the past surfaces within the process of memory as a nagging question, in which the sufficiency of memory to articulate other humans comes into fundamental doubt. In death human-beings become heavier, more substantial than memory, since the finality of a human-being, his or her fatality, signifies a loss that memory cannot comprehend. The loss initiated within death exceeds all possibility and forces those who mourn to confront the impossible, to suffer a loss infinitely beyond restitution.

For this reason, the act of mourning is inevitably intertwined with the call to ethical duty, in which the loss of the other interrogates the loyalty of those who survive. Such loyalty is held not in regard to a memory alone but to this other and the particular gifts he or she has left behind in his or her memory. The memory of the other is shared with those who survive as an ethical obligation to be responsible to the other's address, insofar as it persists in those lives that follow from it. For the annihilated of the Holocaust, for the ghostly faces of fictive Badenheim, such an address has been narrowed to the most impoverished and yet most insistent of gestures. Their disappearance demands that we remember they cannot be remembered.

IV. A GERMAN DAUGHTER MOURNS HER FATHER

Dörte von Westernhagen, in Die Kinder der Täter: das Dritte Reich and die Generation danach,¹³ also encounters the ethical dimension of mourning as she wrestles with the terrible knowledge that her long-dead father, an anti-Semite and SS officer, was a willing participant in the murderous policies of Hitler's Germany.¹⁴ Unlike the elliptical mourning of Badenheim 1939, von Westernhagen's mourning is directed to one who did not suffer the Holocaust but assisted in producing it. He is not annihilated and leaves many survivors behind him. Thus, although he died during her infancy, von Westernhagen is surrounded by his memories in the stories of her mother, her relatives, family neighbors, his former comrades. Yet, her attempt to remember such a man is also disturbed by the collapse of palpable memory in the aftermath of annihilation, although in a manner to be distinguished from the attempt of Badenheim to remember the victims of annihilation.

The daughter speaks of her “pain over the death of the hero” and her “deep rage over the monster and his inability to question the necessity of the suffering of others [fremden], as well as his own.” Von Westernhagen imagines two sides to her father's face, one “good” and the other “evil,” between which there is “nothing.” This split in her father's personality, this nothing, so disturbs her that she finds herself possessed by her father's memory with a persistence that denies her mourning of him the power “to loosen tormenting ties to him” (89).

The daughter speaks of the “nothing” between the two faces of her father, because she is horrified at the thought of placing the murderer of others in the same person as the progenitor of her own life. This “nothing” names the resistance of the daughter to the polluting of the face of fatherly love with the visage of one who is implicated in genocide and atrocity. Precisely where the faces come together shame arises. Confronted with the possibility that evil might swallow the good, that the father turned murderer murders the father's memory, the daughter is haunted by an irreducible disturbance in her memory of him that can no longer be healed. Everywhere in her discussion of the memory of her father, one hears the question “why did he act to infect the world with evil, even as he claimed to do good?” Such a question inflicts a wound upon her from which she would recover.

As in Badenheim 1939, the question arises: How does one heal the wound induced by such a collapse of memory? A persistent German response has been

what the Germans call Schlusstrich, that is, “drawing a line at the bottom of an account” to consign the Third Reich to history and make way for the new democratic, reunified, prosperous “Fourth Reich.”¹⁵

Indeed, von Westernhagen comments on the persistent tendency of family members to criticize her failure to draw such a line. But how can one, how dare one, forget one of two persons for whom one's very existence serves as a memorial? One cannot choose not to have a father, this other whose paternity stretches beyond his death and reaches into one's own life as the memory of that other who gave one one's own life. To forget one's father would be to forget one's self. Through her father's letters and her mother's reminiscences, von Westernhagen knows that her parents, both father and mother, cared for one another and desired that she be born. “Without their love, there would not have been me” (196). Her existence is the gift given by father and mother, two beings whose own existences are the outcome of a similar gift. As the daughter of her particular father, she bears the responsibility to keep alive his memory, a memory that can now only speak for itself through others. Yet he, through his political loyalties and service as an SS officer, involved his daughter's being born with a way of life that led to the brutal annihilation of Jewish memory. To remember such a father is to remember one who implicated himself, as well as his wife and children, in the effort to destroy the memory of the other.

In confronting her father's memory, the memory of a “heroic” and yet “monstrous” human-being, von Westernhagen seeks to make herself conscious of those destructive tendencies within her own psyche passed down to her from her father, many of which in turn had been passed down to him from his father. In this fashion, von Westernhagen resists the process of introjection by no longer letting what was habitual, embodied, unconsciously repeated from generation to generation, to remain so. Such a resistance is ethical; it limits the extent to which one allows one's forebears to constitute one's own being! In mourning, the dead other is not only preserved through one's commemoration of his or her life but just as importantly is brought into question through ethical reflections that the discovery of the memory of others in oneself instigates. The ethical questioning implicit in mourning can even lead to the disowning of the memories of one's forebears, to the decision to root out ways of life inherited from one's parents, because such modes of acting are narcissistic and evil. Nevertheless, the role such remembrance plays, even if it must be negative, in the formation of one's own character means that one can never completely succeed in removing oneself from those ways of acting that one's parents have left behind. For exactly this reason comes the obligation to make secret inheritances conscious so that they might be resisted.

After reflecting on her wish that the process of mourning might finally be brought to a close, that she might be able to come to some peace concerning her father's presence within her, von Westernhagen finds that

until now there has been no end [to the process of mourning]. In the meantime I have concluded that the process of ‘laying claim to our history as an actualized negation of world and self, as one's negative possession' will not end with my generation. Hence only a provisional account can be shared.

(9)

The argument of this essay has been that all attempts to mourn remain unfinished but that the attempt to mourn Auschwitz remains emphatically unfinished. Von Westernhagen's experience of “memory's perpetual unrest” becomes an example of Des Pres's assertion in “The Dreaming Back” that “remembering the past becomes, through disturbance and revulsion and also fear, attention to the present and care for the future” (17–18).¹⁶ Von Westernhagen herself speaks of the Holocaust as a “cultural inheritance” precisely because its unrest prevents one from becoming an “emotional illiterate” such as Eichmann who was entirely incapable of “perceiving the monstrous effects of his actions” (199). Only with such an attention to the fragility of memory, can future generations come to be born in a world committed to respecting the life of others.

Where are these dead? They call to us obliquely, in a memory wounded by annihilation through a testimony that preserves the disturbance of an irrecoverable loss, one which harrows the essentially playful gesture of a literature that would confidently incorporate the dead in the words and works of the living. The failure of words to recall not only the dead but also their memory leaves the survivor in shame, in the question of whether simply to be is just. But this shame and the doubt it provokes become the only possible way in which to confront the horror of Auschwitz, i.e. the horror of a human willingness to annihilate memory itself. Humans can no longer be satisfied with the innocence of a literature whose commemorative gesture would simply situate itself in yet untouched possibilities. The very act of remembrance becomes an act of initiation into monstrosity that will not be left behind. Only where the thought of monstrosity touches humans can the future after Auschwitz be addressed. Memory cannot save us otherwise.

Notes

1. Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim 1939, trans. Dalya Bilu (New York: Washington Square P, 1980).

2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie and Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962).

3. See Being and Time, 287.

4. See Sigmund Freud, “Trauer und Melancholie,” Psychologie des Unbewussten, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1975) and “Die Zerlegung der Psychischen Persönlichkeit,” Gesammelte Werke, Band 15 (London: Imago, 1949).

5. For a more detailed discussion of this view of Freud see Edward Casey's, Remembering (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987), ch. 10 on “Commemoration.” A critique of this view of Freud can also be found in my dissertation, Impossible Mourning: Transcendent Loss and the Memory of Disaster, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1989 (soon to be published by SUNY P).

6. For a discussion of this tendency in Freud, see the “Working Notes” of Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alpohonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968) 269–70. Merleau-Ponty's comment that bodies “incorporate one another: projection-introjection” (263) show both his awareness of Freudian identification and his wish to use it within his own ontology of chair in which the “reversibility” of flesh, its susceptibility to a split existence, is acknowledged.

7. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Macmillan, 1961).

8. This term has been borrowed from Joseph Arsenault and Tony Brinkley of the University of Maine who have developed the Peircian notion of the indexical in two papers, “At the Limits of Formalization” (presented at the Conference of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature at Emory University, 1989) and “Dialectic at a Standstill” (presented at the Conference of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature at the University of California at Irvine, 1990), as a means of witnessing annihilation that resists the irretrievable loss of the voices (and memories) of the annihilated.

9. Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” The Standard Edition, Vol. 14.

10. Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” Collected Philosophical Papers: Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987).

11. Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974).

12. See Emmanuel Levinas, “La Trace de l'autre,” En découvrant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Librairie Philosophique, 1982).

13. Dörte von Westernhagen, Die Kinder der Täter: Das Dritte Reich und die Generation danach (München: Kösel Verlag, 1987).

14. Von Westernhagen found no direct evidence that her father had ever served in any of the death camps. Nevertheless, he served as a captain with the SS on the Eastern front and was likely to have participated in any number of atrocities associated with the invasion of Russia.

15. Eli N. Evans, “Dodging the Burden of History,” New York Times Book Review (29 April 1990) 7. Evans reports in her review of Judith Miller's book—One, By One, By One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990)—that throughout Europe the horror of the Shoah has often been masked by various strategies of denial, particularly in regard to the collaboration of local citizens with the Nazis. Von Westernhagen's struggle to confront her father's memory has implications that go far beyond her own discomfort and confusion. This same burden of memory haunts the political and cultural institutions of the entire continent of Europe. For this reason, the Shoah requires a generation (in Evans's words) with the “willingness to stare into the caldron of this history without flinching.”

16. Terrence Des Pres, “The Dreaming Back,” Centerpoint: The Holocaust, Vol. 4, no. 1 (Fall 1980).