SOURCE: Landsberg, Alison. “America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a Radical Politics of Empathy.” New German Critique 71 (spring-summer 1997): 63-86.

[In the following essay, Landsberg discusses the significance of Maus and the comic book genre as a medium for representing the Holocaust from a fresh visual and emotional perspective.]

Like those birds that lay their eggs only in other species' nests, memory produces in a place that does not belong to it.

—Michel de Certeau¹

In the final scene of Schindler's List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), a marching line of actors leaving a liberated concentration camp dissolves into a marching line of the “real-life” Schindler Jews approaching Schindler's grave in Israel. In this dissolve, the black-and-white film changes to color, signaling both a generic and a temporal shift from the classical Hollywood mode and the past to “real-life” and the present.² The real Schindler Jews walk with the actors and actresses who portrayed them to Schindler's grave, upon which they together place a memorial rock. This scene both ruptures the diegetic world of the film and acts as a guarantee of the movie's “authenticity.” The movement that I would like to emphasize here is not the one from past to present, but rather the one between the authentic survivor and the actor. This moment stages what I take to be the agenda of the film—the transferring of authentic living memory from the body of a survivor to an individual who has no “authentic” link to this particular historical past. At this final moment of Schindler's List, then, when the authentic comes into contact with the inauthentic, when the survivor touches the actor, the possibility emerges for a transmission of memory across radical temporal and geographic chasms. And this transmission is imagined to take place in the context of a Hollywood film. Schindler's List ultimately stages, and acts as an instantiation of, the possibility of a responsible mass cultural transmission of memory.³

Ever since Elie Wiesel posed his famous question—“How does one remember?”—the Holocaust has been articulated as an issue of memory.⁴ Wiesel's challenge suggests that to preserve the Holocaust in history, it must first be preserved in memory. But now we are living in the moment when the survivors (those who actually lived through the event) are beginning to pass away and the possibility of transmitting what one might call “living memory” becomes increasingly precarious and ultimately impossible. The explosion of discourse about the Holocaust is connected to the life span of “living memory,” by which I mean memory linked to the lived experience of an individual, which therefore corresponds to the lifespan of the body.⁵ When there are no longer survivors left to testify, when memories are no longer guaranteed and anchored by a body that lived through them, responsible memory transmission becomes problematic. The problem of transgenerational memory is as old as the concept of memory itself, and yet the problem posed by the Holocaust differs somewhat. We are facing not only the absence of survivors, but the absence of tradition and ritual—of memory practices—that ground the event.

But remembering and bearing witness to the Holocaust pose other problems as well. As Jean-François Lyotard has elegantly observed, the Holocaust represents a limit to the possibility of representation and testimony: “To ‘have really seen with his own eyes’ a gas chamber would be the condition which gives one the authority to say that it exists and to persuade the unbeliever. Yet it is still necessary to prove that the gas chamber was killing at the moment it was seen. The only acceptable proof that it was killing is that one died from it. But if one died from it one cannot testify that it is because of the gas chamber.”⁶ The dilemma of the Holocaust is the epitome of what Lyotard calls the différend, a case “wherein the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes on that account a victim,” a case in which “the ‘regulation’ of the conflict which opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the injustice suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom.”⁷ Lyotard's formulation comes as a political intervention against the willful attempts to erase the Holocaust from memory and history. Attempts at historical revisionism themselves share the logic of the so-called “final solution”—not just to annihilate all the Jews, but to annihilate all the traces of the annihilation.

Here I will explore the way two mass cultural texts and institutions have begun to imagine strategies not simply for transmitting memories, but for creating rituals and practices necessary for the transmission of memory in the face of such obstacles. Because the last survivors are beginning to pass away, the need for alternative modes of memory has become all the more pressing. One attempt to extend the life span of living memory has been to assemble video archives of survivor testimonies.⁸ But the truth claims such testimonies make, and the authority of the first person, becomes more problematic once the testimonies exist only in the recorded, mediated, form.⁹ If memory is a bodily, sensuous phenomenon, as Nietzsche and others suggest, and if it operates on the principle of a mnemotechnics such that “if something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in,”¹⁰ then the question becomes: is it possible for the Holocaust to become a bodily memory for those who have not lived through it? And if so, how might particular mass cultural events, institutions, and practices participate in the process of “burning in” such memories? Mass cultural technologies, this essay will argue, are making available not simply technologies of memory to replace living memory, but strategies and arenas within which an alternative living memory gets produced in those who did not live through the event. These memories are an example of what I have elsewhere called “prosthetic memories.”¹¹

Prosthetic memories are memories that circulate publicly, are not organically based, but are nevertheless experienced with one's own body—by means of a wide range of cultural technologies—and as such, become part of one's personal archive of experience, informing not only one's subjectivity, but one's relationship to the present and future tenses. I call these memories prosthetic, in part, because, like an artificial limb, they are actually worn by the body; these are sensuous memories produced by experience. In Lyotard's account, the différend, “is signaled by what one commonly calls a feeling.”¹² By looking at mass cultural representations of the Holocaust, that is, at the sites of production of “feeling,” I will make the claim that affective power might be mobilized to have a similar kind of political potential as conceptual power. In this essay I will argue that the mass media has begun to construct sites, which I will describe as transferential spaces, in which people are invited to enter into experiential relationships with events through which they themselves did not live. Through such spaces people may gain access to a range of processual, sensually immersed knowledges, knowledges which would be difficult to acquire by purely cognitive means.

I must make clear from the outset that I am not dismissing the danger of modern mass-mediated forms of memory. I take seriously the danger arising from the fact that such memories are subject to revisionism. It is with good reason that one should look skeptically upon the mass media's engagement with history, not only because of the vast possibilities for historical revision, but equally because of the mass media's standard mode of address: a dissemination of predigested messages that require no active engagement or thought on the part of the individual consumer. Nevertheless, the texts that I will address underscore mass culture's potential to engage productively and more complicatedly with the past. While I am presenting here the contours of a utopian vision of a radical practice of memory, it is a vision which grows out of the possibilities I perceive in two American Holocaust “texts”: Art Spiegelman's Maus and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

I

Spiegelman's comic book Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986), subtitled My Father Bleeds History, tells both the story of Artie's contemporary relationship with his father Vladek in Queens, New York, and the story of his parents' experiences during the Nazi occupation, in Poland. The text is haunted by the question of how Artie—or any person of the second generation—can come to own the experiences of their parents, experiences through which they themselves did not live. Towards the end of the first volume Artie and Vladek are taking a walk when Vladek bends over beside a trash can and picks up an old piece of wire. “What did you pick up?” Artie asks. “Telephone wire. This is very hard to find,” Vladek responds and continues, “Inside it's little wires. It's good for tying things.” Exasperated, Artie says “You always pick up trash! Can't you just buy wire?” Vladek responds, “Pssh. Why always you want to buy when you can find!? Anyway, this wire they don't have it in any stores. I'll give to you some wire. You'll see how useful it is.”¹³ This scene functions as an allegory for what the text itself performs. The recirculation of the wire becomes a metaphor for the recirculation of the Holocaust through a different medium (the comic book) suggesting that when one puts the story into a different medium, new insights, new possibilities, emerge. More broadly, the recirculation of the wire functions as an allegory for the potential usefulness of the Holocaust in America; it becomes a way of thinking about the recirculation of “waste” for productive ends. In other words, that the Holocaust might be a grounds for politics, or even for the production of subjectivity, presumes the potential usefulness of even the darkest and seemingly most irredeemable memories of the past.

The recirculation of the Holocaust in comic book form also raises questions about the “appropriateness” or adequacy of various media through which its stories are currently being told.¹⁴ While Spiegelman himself is more of an avant-gardist than a popularist, and while Maus would certainly appear at the high end of the high culture/low culture spectrum, Spiegelman's choice of the comic book form is significant. The comic book originated and still circulates in mass culture.¹⁵ In a discussion of Holocaust representations, Geoffrey Hartman argues that “most of the time, … transmissibility and truth move in opposite directions.”¹⁶ While he is willing to concede the Maus complicates his equation, within his paradigm realism tends to fall on the side of transmissibility, while more abstract, elusive modes of representation fall on the side of truth. By telling a Holocaust story in a popular rather than a high art medium, Spiegelman problematizes Hartman's claim. Not only does Hartman's dichotomy tend to rearticulate a kind of high/low distinction where mass culture, precisely because of its power to transmit, gets relegated to the “low” end, but it also takes the Holocaust outside the realm of representability. An exceptionalist posture brackets the Holocaust, holding it outside the context of one's life. A sophisticated account of the mass media would recognize its radical potential to bring events like the Holocaust into the fabric of an individual's life, into an affective and thinkable context.

Early on in Maus, Vladek describes how friends of his were arrested by the Nazis for doing black-market business and how “the Germans intended to make an example of them” (83) by hanging them publicly. As Vladek describes, “They hanged there one full week” (83). This memory is still so powerful for Vladek that it makes his glass eye cry: “Ach. When I think now of them it still makes me cry. … Look—even from my dead eye tears are coming out!” (84). This moment of public spectacle—and public emotion—makes visible the power of a mass cultural production of affect. Vladek is moved to tears. His glass eye, a prosthetic eye, is as capable of tears as his real eye. But more importantly, his glass eye functions as a metaphor for Artie's eyes—for the eyes of those who did not see first-hand what happened during the Holocaust. The story is real and palpable enough to move to tears even an eye that did not witness what happened.

I do not mean to downplay the importance of Vladek's first-hand account of his experiences during the Holocaust. After all, the transmission of Vladek's story is the impetus behind the comic book. But Maus problematizes the illusion of immediacy which surrounds testimony. Maus is rigorously self-reflexive about its own createdness: Artie is ambivalent about the task he has undertaken, admitting to his wife Françoise, at the beginning of Maus II, that “I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams.”¹⁷ Part of his concern has to do with the medium he has selected: “And trying to do it as a comic strip! I guess I bit off more than I can chew. Maybe I ought to forget this whole thing” (II [Maus: A Survivor's Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began] 16). His concerns about mediation appear throughout the narrative. In what seems an inauthentic or anti-realist gesture, Artie has chosen to represent himself and his father not merely as cartoon figures, but as cartoons of animal figures. Miles Orvell argues that “the reader comes to forget that these are cats, mice, pigs and soon begins to view them instead as human types.”¹⁸ I would make a somewhat different claim: Spiegelman dramatically stages the artificiality necessary to produce something that looks like the authentic. In other words, artificial parameters do not make the affective experiences less real; Vladek's glass eye is able to cry.¹⁹

At the end of Maus, Vladek confesses to Artie that he destroyed his wife Anja's diaries, her first-hand account of the war. Enraged, Artie cries, “God Damn you! You—you MURDERER!” (158-59). By calling his father a murderer, Artie makes an analogy, or rather constructs a metonymy, between Anja's memory and her body. This scene underscores the vulnerability and contingency of even first-hand accounts—her diaries were no less able to escape the flames than she was. The contingency of living memory makes necessary technologies of memory, technologies which, despite their artificiality and manipulability, interface with an individual's subjectivity, and which can, like the glass eye, still produce real tears. In my admittedly optimistic scenario I would argue that mass culture, precisely because of its scope and broad appeal, might be a particularly effective arena in which to stage these encounters between the authentic and the inauthentic.

The ways that the Holocaust has disfigured Vladek become obvious not in the stories he recounts from the camps, but in the moments of narrative present, in Rego Park, New York, where his relationship to even the most mundane objects of daily life have become radically altered. At the beginning of the second chapter of Maus, Artie goes over to hear more of his father's story and finds Vladek counting his pills. Artie begins questioning, “About mom … uh … what are you doing, pop?” Vladek counts, “… 11 … 12 … 13 … I'm making into daily portions my pills … 14 … 15 …” Spiegelman devotes three frames to Vladek's counting, leaving himself out of the drawings. “So many?” Artie asks from outside of the frame. “… 16 … 17 … 18 … It's 6 pills for the heart, 1 for diabetes … and maybe 25 or 30 vitamins” (26). Several pages later Vladek gets carried away in the narration and knocks over the pills: “Look now what you made me do!” From off frame Artie says, “Me? Okay, I'll re-count them later.” “No!” Vladek says. “You don't KNOW counting pills. I'll do it after … I'm an expert for this” (30). What might it mean for Vladek to be “an expert for this”? This scene testifies to the way in which the Holocaust has fundamentally altered Vladek's relationship to objects. The pun implied in counting is instructive. Vladek cannot, of his own accord, “recount” what happened to him; at his home, in Rego Park, he can only count. It is certainly the case that in the deathworld of the concentration camps the most basic objects, like a spoon, or a belt, became immeasurably valuable. But that is not exactly what I have in mind here. Rather, the relationship to objects that the Holocaust forced upon Vladek is part of a mimetics of absence: it bespeaks the loss of people, of bodies, of familial connections.²⁰ We might say that for the second generation, and more radically for the third, the only access to the Holocaust comes through objects, through the piles of objects left behind. Piles, not people, are the legacy of the Holocaust. As I will argue more explicitly with regards to the Holocaust museum, the piles are central to what I would like to identify as an emerging iconography of the Holocaust. In this iconography, piles stand in for the absent bodies. Perhaps Vladek's piles of pills point to the absence of bodies—to a death-world where only the objects remain. Perhaps his very attachment to things is meant to say something about the plight of the Holocaust survivor, about the way he or she verifies existence. If the experience of the Holocaust is precisely the experience of the loss of or absence of people, then the objects stand in for this radical absence. What this pill-counting scene suggests, however, is that like the reader's, Vladek's relationship to the Holocaust, his ability quite literally to “re-count,” is mediated through the objects that remain here in the present.

A practice of memory then, would rely, metaphorically and metonymically, upon the objects that remain. If the objects (and Vladek's relationship to them) signify, metonymically, the incompleteness of survival, then Vladek's counting and saving become visible symptoms he wears on his body. While the objects over which Vladek obsesses are not “authentic” Holocaust objects, they evoke the horror and violence of the event. These scenes from the narrative present tense are in some ways more disturbing than the recollections from Auschwitz. The pills, as objects which he obsessively counts and then spills and then recounts, become inflected with recognizable significance; in this context, the pills and pill counting become part of the Holocaust scene. While they, like the glass eye, are not authentic, did not “see” the Holocaust in a literal way, and are even at a great temporal and spatial disjuncture from the event, they become nevertheless embedded in the logic and signification of the Holocaust.

If Maus is largely concerned with the transmission of memory across generations and with the obstacles to memory that the second generation faces, then the effect of Vladek's stories and objects on Artie is of the utmost importance. The back cover of Maus is a map of World War II Poland with its surrounding countries; onto this map, in the southeast corner of Poland, Spiegelman superimposes a rectangular inset of a map of Rego Park, NY. But the detail I would like to consider is the black and white image of Vladek, in an arm chair, talking to Artie, who is lying on the floor below him. While their image is superimposed over Germany, Slovakia, and Hungary, the figures don't appear to be in any of these places; nor are they in Rego Park. Because Vladek's chair is foreshortened, a three dimensional object against a two dimensional map, it appears to pop out of the picture frame. Vladek and Artie seem to be floating, hovering somewhere between Poland and New York. In other words, the memory transmission, that is, the way that Artie comes to inhabit his father's story, takes place outside of either locale, in a space between them which we might call a “transferential space.”

Transference, in the Freudian sense, is the therapeutic terrain in which neurotic symptoms get played out in a relationship with the analyst, and then undone through the “talking cure.” According to Freud, “the transference thus creates an intermediate region between illness and real life, through which the transition from the one to the other is made. The new condition has taken over all the features of the illness, but it represents an artificial illness which is at every point accessible to our intervention.” And here is the important part: “It is a piece of real experience, but one which has been made possible by especially favorable conditions and it is of a provisional nature.”²¹ Like the artificial glass eye which nevertheless enables real tears, this kind of transferential space of telling, this artificially constructed space between Vladek and Artie, allows Artie to take on his father's memories. Significantly, it is not “therapy” or “cure” that I am proposing, but rather a mechanism by which memory and affect get transferred from one person to another.

A transferential space becomes crucial to the transmission of memory in the case of the Holocaust, where the possibility of a direct genealogy has been radically destroyed. In Foucault's account, genealogy is an “analysis of descent.” Invoking Nietzsche, Foucault writes that the task of genealogy is “to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body.”²² There is no doubt that Vladek's body is marked by the Holocaust; his tattoo is only the most literal of his scars. Everything he touches and all the objects he “uses” become, metonymically, a piece of the Holocaust. But the kinds of ruptures the Holocaust literalizes—the death of a population—cannot be imagined in the Foucauldian paradigm. Foucault concludes, saying “The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is … to make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us.”²³ But the Holocaust survivors do not have the luxury of doing otherwise: the ruptures are more radical and more permanent than any Foucault envisions. For Artie, and for those who have no direct link to the Holocaust, memories of the Holocaust are always at least once removed. So how can this descent mark Artie's body? How can those memories so crucial to preserve become grounded in his body, in his person? Artie says, “I know this is insane, but I somehow wish I had been in Auschwitz with my parents so I could really know what they lived through” (II 16). Is there any way for him to wear this experience on his body? Perhaps in this liminal transferential space he can begin to feel what Vladek felt. In the scene with his psychiatrist, Artie complains, “Some part of me doesn't want to draw or think about Auschwitz. I can't visualize it clearly and I can't begin to imagine what it felt like” (II 6). His psychiatrist, who is also a survivor, emphasizes the necessary bodily engagement with Holocaust memory, saying “What Auschwitz felt like? Hmm … How can I explain it? BOO!” Artie, surprised, jumps back and lets out a “Yiiiii.” His psychiatrist is suggesting that Auschwitz cannot be conveyed purely as a narrative, but needs to be transmitted or conveyed affectively, viscerally. The telling does need to mark the body in the way Nietzsche imagines. As the psychiatrist explains, “It felt like that. But always! From the moment you got to the gate until the very end” (II 46). Being in a transferential space with his psychiatrist, and more broadly with Vladek, enables Artie to come as close as possible to taking on the symptoms—the memories—of the Holocaust, through which he did not live.

II

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, like the liminal space which Vladek and Artie inhabit, becomes an actual site of sensuous as well as cognitive knowledge production. It raises questions about what it means to own or inhabit a memory of an event through which one did not live. And it provides a terrain upon which to begin to imagine the political utility of prosthetic memories. The museum, which was proposed by President Carter's Commission on the Holocaust in 1979, opened its doors in March 1993, after years of planning and negotiating.²⁴ The permanent exhibit consists of three floors: the Nazi Assault 1933-39, the Final Solution 1940-45, and the Last Chapter, respectively. A large elevator transports visitors to the top floor, from which they work their way down. While its layout may not sound radically different from that of other museums, some structural differences are worthy of note. First of all, the visitor is at the mercy of the museum and must submit oneself to its pace and its logic. There is no way out short of traversing the entire exhibit; one must wind one's way down all three floors. The architecture and exhibition design conspire to force each visitor to confront images and objects that might, in other museums, be willfully ignored. Secondly, there are only five places in the entire exhibit where visitors may sit down. The museum is physically and emotionally exhausting and yet insists that one persevere in the face of discomfort.

The Holocaust museum, in other words, is what I would call an experiential museum, and is part of a larger trend in American mass culture toward the experiential as a mode of knowledge. The American public seems to be increasingly drawn to experiential mass cultural forms—from experiential museums like this one to the hugely attended D-Day reenactments of 1994. The popularity of these media events signal a widespread desire to experience history in a personal, bodily way. They offer one way of making history into personal memory and thus advance the production of prosthetic memories. One might say that they provide individuals with a public opportunity to have an experiential relationship to a collective or cultural past. In my call to take seriously this popular desire to “experience” history, I do not mean to undervalue the importance of academic historiography in the traditional medium of the printed word; rigorous, researched-based histories of the Holocaust and the Third Reich will always be a crucial bulwark against the tides of historical revisionism.²⁵ Nor do I mean blindly to embrace historical reenactments as a particularly desirable mode of historiography. And I am certainly not suggesting that such an experiential mode of knowledge replace the cognitive. The Holocaust museum itself is deeply invested in the rigorousness of its history; as Leon Wieseltier has elegantly argued, the museum is predicated upon the assumption that history must accompany memory, “that feeling must be annotated by fact.”²⁶ What I am urging is that we take seriously the widespread desire on the part of Americans to experience and to live history, that we recognize the importance of this experiential mode in the acquisition of particular kinds of knowledges. It might be the case that contemporary mass cultural forms enable a version of experience which relies less on categories like the real, the authentic, and sympathy than on categories like knowledge, responsibility, and empathy. The mass media increasingly has the ability to create or to make available frameworks within which individuals might experience a sensually immersed, processual form of knowledge—and these are the kinds of experiences upon which prosthetic memories might be based. This is to say that mass media makes available the conditions under which individuals might be able to attach themselves to pasts they did not live or to identities to which they are not biologically circumscribed.

If the experiential mode bears such radical potential, it also engenders a great deal of intellectual anxiety. The most vehement critiques of the Holocaust museum (aside from those questioning its very existence) seem to circulate around its experiential character. In his attack on the museum as “one more American theme park,” Philip Gourevitch explains, “It was not exactly depression or fear or revulsion that overcame me as I stood before this exhibit, though I experienced all those reactions at one moment or another in the museum. Nor was it that I had seen it all before. The problem was simply that I could not make out the value of going through this.”²⁷ Of his experience walking through a German freight car, he says, “It was small and dark inside. I felt like a trespasser, someone engaged in an unwholesome experience, the way I might feel if I were asked to lie in someone else's coffin.”²⁸ What is so disconcerting and unsettling to Gourevitch is precisely the experiential involvement the museum demands. Any event, institution, or cultural practice that attempts to decenter the cognitive falls prey to such attacks. And it has become all too easy—perhaps even a cliché—to label any such experiential museum a “Disneyland” or a theme park.

Perhaps the hostility, mostly on the part of academics and middle-brow journalists, toward the experiential mode reflects an anxiety about the threat posed by an experiential mode of knowledge to the hegemony of the cognitive. The experiential mode complements the cognitive with affect, sensuousness, and tactility. In the case of the Holocaust museum—in the case of the Holocaust in general—the cognitive model is woefully inadequate.²⁹ Could there be a linear narrative, a logical formulation which would make the experience of the Holocaust comprehensible?³⁰ The power of the Holocaust museum derives from the constellation of different narratives that it assembles: newspaper articles, survivor testimonies, historical analyses. In other words, even at the moments that one's body is actively engaged by the architecture and strategies of display, the engagement is anchored by historical narratives. It would be reductive to presume that a museum or a movie, simply by attempting to engage spectators physically as well as cognitively, irresponsibly conflates history and entertainment. In fact, the popularity of this new genre of experiential museums reflects a change in what counts as knowledge. Their popularity also reflects the ways in which different “technologies of memory” alter the mechanisms by which individuals come to acquire knowledge. If experience, as I will describe it, becomes increasingly important in the popular acquisition of knowledge, then a blurring of the boundary between “entertainment” and “history” might not be a purely negative event.

The museum visit is designed to be an experience for you, the visitor. Before stepping into the elevator each visitor takes an identification card which tells the story of an individual during the Holocaust. As Martin Smith, director of the permanent exhibit explains, “Six million deaths can become a statistic, but one person's death is a personal tragedy, a keenly felt tragedy.”³¹ Importantly, many of the lives described by these cards are those of non-Jews. The museum attempts to strike a balance between portraying the Holocaust as a uniquely Jewish event and portraying it as a portable tragedy that drains the events of their historical specificities. The museum's inclusion of non-Jewish victims is crucial to its mode of address; it is equally accessible to a non-Jewish population. Card in hand you enter the ominous black elevator—the guards lead you in but leave before the doors close. Unlike most elevators you have been in, this one has no buttons and no controls. A video monitor in the elevator plays footage of Americans discovering the camps at liberation. The elevator doors open onto a dark room. The fourth floor, entitled “Nazi Assault 1933-39” documents the Nazi's rise to power. While several of the exhibits and showcases are optional, meaning not in the path you must follow to move through the exhibit, by and large your mobility is directed. The display cases on this top floor are arranged thematically, each documenting the circumstances and events surrounding the Nazi rise: a long corridor of display cases is given over to topics such as the “Takeover of Power, 1933,” “The Terror Begins,” “The Burning of Books,” “The Nuremberg Laws,” and so on. Each display case contains newspaper articles, Nazi artifacts, and video monitors which run news footage covering the events described.

As you descend to the next floor, entitled “The Final Solution”—the one I will discuss in the greatest detail—traditional museum space is radically, disconcertingly, ruptured. On this floor your freedom of movement is much more radically restricted. You find yourself upon a boardwalk-like walkway. The ground beneath your feet is uneven. You are walking on cobblestones—cobblestones, you learn, which have come from the Warsaw ghetto. On this floor, there is no longer a clear distinction between your space and the exhibit, your body and the history of the objects all around you. Gone are the display cases. To your right are video monitors with newsreels from the ghettos (Theresienstadt, Warsaw, Lodz, and Kovno); to your left are objects from these places: tools from the ghetto workshops, stained glass windows from the Cracow synagogue, the Lodz hospital door. Even though you are not invited to touch these objects, their very materiality, I would argue, their seductive tangibility, draws you into a lived relationship with them. From the initial conception of the museum, objects were considered fundamental to the exhibiting strategy. Not only are they meant to testify—as evidence—to the atrocities, but they are imagined to be in some measure digestible, comprehensible in a local way. The November 1988 museum newsletter issued a worldwide call for Holocaust artifacts, because “[t]he ‘object survivors’ will help depict the Holocaust period for visitors to the museum.”³² You and they are inhabiting the same space. You have moved, as it were, from the realm of what we might call the cognitive logic of the fourth floor (the realm of photographs and texts) to the logic of the corporeal experiential. Because these objects offer the illusion of unmediated proximity, because unlike the printed word and the photograph, they do not operate upon a principle of distance, one's relationship to them becomes radically uncertain—so uncertain that at moments one might find oneself longing for the security of the display case, for the distance and mediation it both presupposes and constructs.

Perhaps the most radical eradication of the dichotomy between our space and museum or object space occurs when we pass through a boxcar which was used to transport Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka in 1942-43. Inside it is dark and small and empty, and yet the thought that 100 bodies filled that very car haunts the space. Its emptiness produces a kind of cognitive dissonance—you attempt to reconcile its present emptiness with the fact that people were at one time crammed into its interior. The effect, I would argue, is an odd sense of spatial intimacy with those people who are at an unbridgeable distance—with people who are profoundly absent. When you emerge from the freight car you enter the world of the death camps: piles of personal belongings confiscated at the camps like scissors, razors, hairbrushes, kitchen utensils, bunks from Auschwitz. The piles, it seems, have a semiotic of their own. The pile has become the “aesthetic” of the Holocaust, precisely because it now evokes a deathworld.³³ It is through this semiotic, or iconography, of the pile, that the mute surviving objects speak. One is struck by the painful irony that these objects made it to the United States, to safety, while their owners never did. Halfway through the permanent exhibit, in the middle of the second of three floors, a walkway leads you through the room of shoes. These shoes are not displayed in any strict sense, nor are they sorted into pairs. Rather, they are a chaotic, jumbled sea of shoes. The shoes, to your left and right, number into the thousands. What strikes me, as I stand in the middle of this room, is that there is a smell. Hanging in the air is the stale smell of old shoes.

But these “survivor shoes,” perhaps more than any other Holocaust image, have gained wide circulation. Fredric Jameson begins his collection of essays on postmodernism by comparing Van Gogh's modernist portrayal of peasant shoes to Andy Warhol's postmodernist “Diamond Dust Shoes.” He locates as the fundamental difference between these two works that while Van Gogh's shoes speak, are “a clue or a symptom of some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth.” Warhol's shoes do “not really speak to us at all.”³⁴ Unlike Van Gogh's peasant shoes which Jameson claims, drawing on Martin Heidegger's 1933 interpretation, “slowly re-create about themselves the whole missing object world which was once their lived context,”³⁵ Warhol's shoes appear as “a random collection of dead objects hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips, as shorn of their earlier life world as the pile of shoes left over from Auschwitz. …”³⁶ This difference becomes, for Jameson, a microcosm of the rupture he finds between the modern and the postmodern. For Jameson, the postmodern is ineluctably tied to the logic of capitalism; the seriality of the Warhol shoes embody the logic of the commodity.

Standing amid this room of shoes at the Holocaust museum one is struck not by the commodity-like seriality of these shoes, but rather by their worn, lived individuality: a sandal, a cracked leather work shoe, a boot. Each shoe bears the trace of the absent body that lived and marked it. For this reason, the shoes at the Holocaust museum are more akin to Van Gogh's shoes. As Heidegger describes, “From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. …”³⁷ And yet, what the museum evokes is by no means a Heideggerian ontology of objects. While the Van Gogh shoes evoke a life world, one lived by the peasant woman, these shoes evoke the deathworld of the concentration camps. The crucial difference from Van Gogh's shoes, of course, has to do with the sheer numbers. If the peasant shoes evoke the woman's life in the fields, the shoes at the museum—all different, all unique, and yet piled chaotically, an unsorted mass—evoke the massness and magnitude of the killing at concentration camps.

These mute objects, the objects that survived the Holocaust, stimulate our mimetic faculty. In his 1933 essay “On the Mimetic Faculty,” Walter Benjamin posits that “the highest capacity for producing similarities is man's.”³⁸ But what does it mean to have a mimetic engagement with an object? In Michael Taussig's words, mimesis means “to get hold of something by means of its likeness,” which for him, implies both “a copying or imitation, and a palpable, sensuous, connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived.”³⁹ Mimesis entails a “corporeal understanding” and therefore questions the traditionally privileged position of vision in constructing intelligibility. For Taussig, mimesis offers an alternative mode of knowledge: “[W]hat happens is that the very concept of knowing something becomes displaced by a relating to.”⁴⁰ While authorial intent is always dangerous terrain, it is worth noting that the museum architect, James Inigo Freed, echoes Taussig's sentiment: “I felt intuitively that this was an emotional building, not an intellectual building, and I didn't know whether it was possible to do it.”⁴¹ In describing his intentions he says, “I want to leave it open as a resonator of emotions. Odd or quiet is not enough. It must be intestinal, visceral; it must take you in its grip.”⁴²

The kind of mimesis one experiences at the Holocaust museum, however, is of a somewhat different order from what Taussig describes. The mimesis one experiences with these “object survivors” is not an experience of presence, but rather an experience of profound absence. We experience the objects as the sensuous trace of an absence. A visitor's ability to have a prosthetic relationship to those objects, I would argue, is predicated upon the object's indexicality—upon their “realness” and materiality—but it is also predicated upon each visitor's sense of who he or she is; there is a simultaneous negotiation with the object (and the other that it represents) and with the individual's own archive of experiences. For at the same moment that we experience the shoes as their shoes—which could very well be our shoes—we feel our own shoes on our feet. The disinvestment the objects represent can only be traumatic if we feel all the while ourselves. Freud describes a similar sensation, the sensation of inhabiting disbelief, as “derealization,” or “depersonalization” which produces a momentary split in the ego.⁴³

In the museum, we have on the one hand a proliferation of objects and an eerie lack of bodies, and on the other, a pronounced sense of our own bodies. By engaging an individual's mimetic faculty, the museum makes empathy possible. The word empathy, unlike sympathy which has been in use since the sixteenth century, makes its first appearance at the beginning of this century. While sympathy presupposes an initial likeness between subjects, empathy starts from the position of difference.⁴⁴ Empathy is “[t]he power of projecting one's personality into … the object of contemplation.”⁴⁵ We might say that empathy depends less on “natural” affinity than sympathy, less on some kind of essential underlying connection between the two subjects. While sympathy, therefore, relies upon an essentialism of identification, empathy recognizes the alterity of identification. Empathy, then, is about the lack of identity between subjects, about negotiating distances.⁴⁶ Empathy, especially as it is constructed out of mimesis, is not emotional self-pitying identification with victims, but a way of both feeling for, while feeling different from, the subject of inquiry.

If the museum does in fact become the occasion for an empathic relationship to the Holocaust victims, then we might imagine the museum as what I have called a transferential space. I would like to suggest that what occurs in these public spaces which impose a corporeal, experiential logic might be exactly the inverse of the psychoanalytic process. In other words, these spaces might actually install in us “symptoms” or prosthetic memories through which we didn't actually live, but to which we now, after a museum experience or a filmic experience, have a kind of experiential relationship. Freud describes transference as “a piece of real experience, but one which has been made possible by especially favorable conditions and it is of a provisional nature.”⁴⁷ The transferential space of the Holocaust museum, then, is not a place where old memories, worn on the body as symptoms, are revealed and dismantled through talk, but rather a site where new symptoms, new “prosthetic” memories, are incorporated into the body. As we take on these prosthetic memories, incorporating these symptoms, we are simultaneously giving over our bodies to these mute objects. We take on their memories and become their prostheses.

But what are the texture and contours of these new memories? For James Freed, the museum architect, “memory is a charlatan.” As he explains, “Everybody I talked to has reconstructed a different memory of the event. I as the architect reconstruct yet another memory that never was, but it can act as a resonator for the memories of others.”⁴⁸ He constructs “memory that never was.” His polemical statement is not intended to justify or to sanction revisionism, but rather to underscore the negotiation between an individual's own archive of images and experiences and the archive presented at the museum. We might use this notion—that everybody has “reconstructed a different memory of the event”—to interrogate the very notion of repetition, which is a fundamental component of mimesis. In Dominick LaCapra's account of the Freudian stages of dealing with trauma, “repetition” and “acting out” are inferior to the more productive and critical stage of “working through.”⁴⁹ While working through might be the desired result of individual therapy, it might not be the best case scenario (or even a possibility) when it comes to remembering the Holocaust. Following Freud, LaCapra privileges the cognitive phase of working through over the more experiential, affective acting out and in so doing overlooks the potential power of the experiential to make historical or political events meaningful in a personal, local way. He also overlooks the productive, generative quality of repetition. First of all, through repetition, images become recognizable; in other words, repetition is what allows a public iconography to develop. And events and issues need to be representable to become a politics. Second of all, repetition does not produce—or reproduce—the same. In fact, one might argue that repetition actually produces difference. In his famous essay “Of the Gaze,” Jacques Lacan describes “natural” repetition—mimicry—in just such a way: “The effect of mimicry is camouflage, in the strictly technical sense. It is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming mottled—exactly like the technique of camouflage practiced in human warfare.”⁵⁰ Lacan's description of mimicry underscores the way that repetition is not homogenizing, but rather has the potential to generate difference.

Likewise, the mimetic engagement one enters into at the museum produces difference. Listening to testimonies, for example, one does not take on the speaker's memory wholesale; rather one constructs a memory triggered by the testimonial and yet intimately connected to one's own archive of experience. In a small glass room called “Voices from Auschwitz,” visitors listen to an audio tape of voices describing daily life at the camp. Without any visual reinforcement one finds oneself drawing up mental images, constructing in one's head the scenes one hears described. Perhaps these mental images come from concentration camp photos one has seen, or from Schindler's List, or from old family photographs. Listening, we give images to their memories, a context to their voices. In a room full of listeners, the same story produces many different memories. We, too, produce a memory that no one ever had. And the act of taking on these prosthetic memories transfigures our own subjectivities.

An experience I had at the museum illustrates the power of this experiential mode of historiography to produce prosthetic memories and new kinds of knowledges that radically affect one's personhood. On my last day at the museum I was moving rather quickly through the exhibit, taking some last minute notes. I was in cognitive mode—or so, at least I thought. As I came through the boxcar I saw a guard, visibly distraught, speaking into his walkie-talkie. I slowed down enough to hear him reporting that there was smoke coming out of a vent above us. I looked up and sure enough smoke was wafting into the room. My immediate response was not, as it would have been in almost any other public building, that there was a fire. My response was, rather, are we being gassed? This experience points up rather dramatically how the museum's transgression of the traditional exhibiting strategies, its blurring of the dichotomy between the spectator and the exhibit, might actually make vulnerable the bodies of its spectators. In other words, the absolutely irrational—that we could be gassed in the Holocaust museum—seemed, if only for an instant, possible. It was momentarily conceivable that something as sinister as systematic genocide could take place through normal government channels, that even a public institution might not be safe. To be in a position where something absolutely unthinkable, becomes, if only for a fleeting instant, imaginable, might be as close as one could come to understanding the logic of the Holocaust. Obviously, what I experienced was a rare occurrence. However, it speaks to the power of the museum to insert its visitors' bodies into a threatening context. And that experience is no Disneyland.

To argue that objects and sites of cultural production which complement the cognitive with the mimetic or the affective and which participate in the logic of what I would call the corporeal experiential are mere theme parks is to overlook what might well be a transformation in the present modalities of knowledge. To experience, if only for a flash, the way it feels to have your personhood or agency stripped away, may be the grounds for understanding or for having empathy for something totally other and cognitively unimaginable. Perhaps the experience of vulnerability might itself be a form of knowledge about the Holocaust. In other words, the museum functions as a frame within which one might experience a kind of sensually as well as intellectually immersed knowledge—a form of knowledge predicated upon an experiential relationship to history. Certain aspects of the Holocaust are brought into dramatic relief by having one's agency threatened. It might be the case that for the event to become meaningful enough to retain as part of one's intellectual and emotional archive, upon which one's actions in the future might be based, it needs to be significant not just on a cognitive level, but palpable in an individual, affective way.

Gourevitch states that he “could not make out the value of going through this.” In other words, to what ends does this mimesis—this experientially produced knowledge—work? As Susan Buck-Morss notes, for Benjamin the radical potential of mimesis is political; in mimesis “cognitive reception is no longer contemplative but tied to action.”⁵¹ Aside from honoring the promise that survivors made to their families and friends as they entered the gas chambers, there might be other reasons for inhabiting, or being inhabited by, these memories. And they might have to do, as Benjamin suggests, with action. Representing the Holocaust is about making the Holocaust concrete and thinkable. It is about finding ways to “burn in” memories so that they might become meaningful locally, so that they might become the grounds for political engagement in the present and the future. Maybe there is not a literal truth to the Holocaust in America. It is not, like slavery and the slaughter of the native Americans, one of the atrocities that happened here; and yet there certainly is a larger truth. The power of its imagery to attract such widespread national attention demonstrates that. If an iconography of the Holocaust is emerging, an iconography which is all about objects and the disembodied and the dispossessed, about things which have been deprived of their ability to speak, then it might help us find ways to address our local traumas, our national différend. If the mass media, mass cultural sites, and events can become transferential arenas in which we learn to wear the memories of such traumas so that they become imaginable to us, thinkable, and speakable to us, then these mass cultural technologies of memory deserve our most serious consideration.

Notes

1. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: U of California P, 1984) 86.

2. Miriam Hansen has argued that Schindler's List draws heavily on the conventions of classical Hollywood cinema. See Miriam Hansen, “Schindler's List Is Not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism and Public Memory,” Critical Inquiry 22.2 (Winter 1996) 292-312.

3. The release of Schindler's List—and the voluminous debate it initiated—catalyzed something like a public sphere for Holocaust memory in the United States not unlike the one produced by the airing of the television miniseries Holocaust in Germany in January 1979. See Siegfried Zielinski, “History as Entertainment and Provocation: The TV Series Holocaust in West Germany,” New German Critique 19 (Winter 1980): 81-96. The miniseries provoked discussion about the pedagogical value of affect and identification in teaching about the Holocaust. Scholars like Andreas Huyssen, who were sanguine about the power of affective identification, read the “emotional explosion” that ensued in Germany as an indication of “how desperately the Germans needed identification in order to break down the mechanism of denial and suppression.” See Andreas Huyssen, “The Politics of Identification: ‘Holocaust’ and West German Drama,” After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington UP, 1986) 113.

4. Cited in Kenneth L. Woodward et. al., “Facing Up to the Holocaust,” Newsweek 85 (26 May 1975): 72.

5. My account of “living memory” is not intended to be synonymous with what Laura Otis calls “organic memory,” which operates as if biologically whether it is biological or not. See Laura Otis, Organic Memory (Nebraska: U of Nebraska P, 1994).

6. Jean-Francois Lyotard, “The Différend, The Referent, and the Proper Name,” Diacritics 14.3 (Fall 1984): 4.

7. Lyotard 5.

8. While there has been much debate about the parameters and aesthetic constraints of Holocaust representation, Holocaust testimonies—the first hand eyewitness accounts of survivors—have always held a privileged position. There have been many attempts to construct an archive of Holocaust testimonies. Perhaps the largest (The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies) was established at Yale in 1982 and has over 1400 recorded testimonies. Such testimonies—because they are video—rely quite heavily on survivors' bodies and on the story those bodies tell. Lawrence Langer has written extensively on the Holocaust testimony as a genre of its own and has argued that unlike a fictional story with linearity and closure, Holocaust testimony is riddled with gaps, fissures, ruptures, and digressions: closure is not a possibility. See Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991). Also see Geoffrey Hartman, “Public Memory and Its Discontents,” Raritan 13.4 (Spring 1994): 24-40. Such testimonies are imagined as a bulwark against the tide of Holocaust deniers and their value and importance should not be underrated. I would also like to underscore that I am sympathetic to the project, not least because of the tribute it pays both to those who died and to those who survived the atrocities of the Holocaust.

9. The problem becomes even more apparent when we enter the age of digitalization—when any image can be constructed to look “authentic.”

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969) 61.

11. See Alison Landsberg, “Prosthetic Memory: Blade Runner and Total Recall,” Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, eds. Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (London: Sage, 1995) 175-89.

12. Lyotard 7.

13. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History (New York: Pantheon, 1986) 116. Hereafter page references will appear parenthetically in the body of the text.

14. Much of the literary scholarship on the Holocaust has attended itself to this topic. Questions of representation have been of central importance ever since Theodor W. Adorno's polemical assertion that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz. For an overview of the positions of prominent Holocaust historians and literary critiques, see Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988). See also a more recent volume, Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1994).

15. See Joseph Witek, Comic Books as History (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1989) and Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993). As Crafton has noted, the cartoonist at his table is a standard convention of the animated cartoon.

16. Geoffrey Hartman, “Darkness Visible,” Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory 21. See also Geoffrey Hartman, “Public Memory and Its Discontents,” Raritan 13.4 (Spring 1994).

17. Art Spiegelman, Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (New York: Pantheon, 1991) 16. Hereafter page references will appear in the body of the text.

18. Miles Orvell, “Writing Posthistorically: Krazy Kat, Maus and the Contemporary Fiction Cartoon,” American Literary History 4:1 (Spring 1992): 119.

19. In his work on dreams, Freud argues that affect is more closely tied to “truth” than narrative. While the original dream thoughts undergo distortion—condensation and displacement—the affect of the dream thoughts remains unaltered. See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Avon, 1965) 497-525.

20. What I am calling a “mimetics of absence” is not dissimilar from what Andreas Huyssen calls “mimetic approximation.” Unlike Huyssen, however, the form of mimesis I am imagining is mediated through a relationship with objects. See Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1994).

21. Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 12 (London: Hogarth, 1958) 62, 154.

22. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977) 148.

23. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” 162.

24. See Elie Wiesel, Chairman, “President's Commission on the Holocaust: Report to the President,” 27 Sept. 1979.

25. See Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985); Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-45, trans. Ina Friedman (New York: Oxford UP. 1990); Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context (New York: Oxford UP, 1994); and Götz Aly, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene, trans. Belinda Cooper (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1994). Many of these historians are invested in constructing the historical context in which the events of the Holocaust make sense.

26. Leon Wieseltier, “After Memory: Reflections on the Holocaust Memorial Museum,” The New Republic (3 May 1993). As I will describe in the pages that follow, the much-debated museum exhibition and display strategy is such that affect is always connected to historical fact. See Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: A History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Boston: Little Brown, 1993). For the Living, video, WETA, Washington D.C., 1993, documents the building of the museum and the debates surrounding the display strategies. See also Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (New York: Viking, 1995).

27. Philip Gourevitch, “Behold Now Behemoth: The Holocaust Memorial Museum: One More American Theme Park,” Harper's (July 1993): 60.

28. Gourevitch 61.

29. James Young makes a similar point in his thorough and insightful book, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning in Europe, Israel, and America (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993).

30. I do not mean to suggest that the Holocaust was illogical. I wish only to convey the enormous difficulty of trying to fathom, on the individual level, how such events could have been a lived reality. In fact, important work is currently being done which exposes how terrifyingly logical the “Final Solution” actually was.

31. Martin Smith, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Newsletter (Apr. 1990).

32. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Newsletter (Nov. 1988) 6. As an article in the March 1990 newsletter describes, “In the permanent exhibition, when visitors gaze at a section of the Warsaw Ghetto Wall, or pass beneath the Auschwitz ‘Arbeit macht frei’ [Work will make you free] gate, read the markings on the wall built of headstones in the Kracow Jewish cemetery or walk along a path that once connected two sections of the Treblinka death camp, what they see, feel and experience will be authentic.” See United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Newsletter (March 1990) 6.

33. I use aesthetic here with the intention of invoking its original etymological meaning. Susan Buck-Morss has traced its roots back to the Greek word aisthisis which she defines as “the sensory experience of perception” from which she concludes that “The original field of aesthetics is not art but reality—corporeal, material nature.” See Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” new formations 20 (Summer 1993): 125.

34. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991) 8.

35. Jameson 8.

36. Jameson 8.

37. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971) 33-34.

38. Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978) 333.

39. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity (New York: Routledge, 1993) 21.

40. Taussig 26.

41. James Inigo Freed, “The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,” assemblage 9 (1989): 59.

42. Freed 73.

43. Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 22 (London: Hogarth, 1964) 244-45.

44. “Sympathy,” Oxford English Dictionary, 1989 ed. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, sympathy is “[a] (real or supposed) affinity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly or correspondingly affected by the same influence.”

45. “Empathy,” Oxford English Dictionary, 1989 ed.

46. In Eric Santner's account, “The capacity to feel grief for others and guilt for the suffering one has directly or indirectly caused, depends on the capacity to experience empathy for the other as other.” See Eric L. Santer, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990) 7.

47. Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” 154.

48. Freed 64.

49. In his book, Representing the Holocaust, Dominick LaCapra attempts to map the Freudian account of trauma and its therapy onto our relationship to the Holocaust—the stages are repetition, acting out, and working through. LaCapra ends up privileging working through, because for him, it is impossible to get critical distance in acting out; he acknowledges “the need to work through them critically rather than to remain fixated in at times necessary processes of acting out.” See LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994) 175.

50. Jacques Lacan, “The Line and the Light,” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977) 99.

51. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT, 1989) 270.