LAWRENCE
L.
LANGER
Pursuit of Death in Holocaust Narrative
A
UTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE
by its very nature explores a jour–
ney that has not yet reached its end. A recent study of the genre
is called
Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing.
It
occurs
to
me that a study of Holocaust memory and narrative might jus–
tifiably be subtitled "The Weave of Death-Writing." Although Holocaust
testimonies and memoirs are of course concerned with how one went on
living in the midst of German atrocities, their subtexts offer us a theme
that is more difficult
to
express or understand : how, under those minimal
conditions, slowly but inexorably, one went on dying-every day, every
hour, every minute of one's agonizing existence. We are forced to rede–
fine the meaning of survival, as the positive idea of staying alive is
usurped by the negative one of fending off death. The impact on con–
sciousness of this di lemma is a neglected but important legacy of the
experience we call the Holocaust.
The Holocaust survivors I am speaking of do not merely recover their
lives in their narratives. Through complex associations with their mur–
dered comrades, family members, and communities they also recover
what 1 call their missed destiny of death. Because the logic of existence
in places such as Auschwitz dictated that you should die, witnesses often
feel that survival was an
abnormal
result of their ordeal in the camps, a
violation of the expected outcome of their detention. They were not
meant
to
return. Charlotte Delbo calls the first volume of her Auschwitz
memoir
Aucun de nous ne reviendra (None of Us Will Return).
This has
nothing to do with guilt or what some label a death wish but with a
stubborn intuition that unlike the others, through accident or luck,
those who held out somehow mistakenly eluded their intended end. In
many instances the sensation of being dead while alive reflects a dual
thrust of their present being: in chronological time they seek their future
while in durational time, those isolated moments of dreadful memories
that do not dissipate but congeal into dense claws of tenacious con–
sciousness, a lethal past relentlessly pursues them.
According
to
Auschwitz survivor Jean Amery, mass murder in the
form of genocide forced its victims
to
live not next door to but in the
