NORMAN MANEA
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consumer democracy. That I (like Walser, presumably) would have pre–
ferred to keep alive the memory of this tragedy in a different way doesn't
much change matters. After all, what would the alternative have been? If
poetry did not cease to exist after Auschwitz, why should other expres–
sions of life in its various manifestations cease, whether they belong
to
the
"higher spheres" or are of more banal, "humble" origin? Without this
"lower sphere," life could not go on. The Holocaust, after all, did not
become well-known primarily through sophisticated forms of representa–
tion.
As overwhelming as it was, the Holocaust did not put an end to the
course of human existence. Life went on, outside the sphere of memory,
but also within and in relation
to
it.
Reactions to the Holocaust are no less various and contradictory than
other human responses, for even this barbarism was the work of humans,
not demons: it came neither from hell nor out of nothing. Some sacralized
the tragedy, others denied its existence; some suffered silently from the
wounds they bore, still others took it as a basis for investigation, pity, hate,
revelation, revenge, despair. Unfortunately I am not religious, but I must
confess that the Jewish prohibition on pronouncing the name of God or
n1.aking images of him has always struck me as somehow more appropriate
than the naive fairy-tale iconography of other religions. Perhaps I'd have
been satisfied to have the catastrophe known as "the Holocaust" similarly
enshrouded in a solemn, dignified silence. But I am not sure if there can
be any solution to this dilemma.
Perhaps Samuel Beckett described the problem best. Not long after the
war, in 1949, he wrote: "There is nothing to express, nothing with which
to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express... together
with the obligation to express." In the more than fifty years that have
passed since it took place, the general public response to the Holocaust has
changed from silence to a more and more open and insistent reappraisal;
to the current state of saturation. Expression took a variety of forms: doc–
uments, memoirs, reminiscences, diaries, debates, novels, poems, films, plays,
works of art. Many of these works are minor, but many are original,
authentic, and striking. The substantial repercussions in the mass media,
sparked less by the most sigruficant works than by the products appealing
to the general public, have kept the memory of these events alive in the
public imagination.
This dilemma was brought home
to
me in particular by the success of
Schindler's List.
I entered the movie theater curious and apprehensive. The
audience, primed by the full-blown advertising campaign, awaited the film
in reverent silence. When it was over, the optimistic finale received tumul–
tuous applause as the dead and the living came together to sing about a
