Tumulte – Excesse – Pogrome. Kollektive Gewalt gegen Juden in Europa 1789–1900

Abstract

words) we are ‘standing within a void of memory’ (p. 259) is not an absence to be overcome but a vital part of what it means to engage with the history and legacy of mass death. Some experiences – the final seconds in the gas chamber, for example – are not entirely recoverable. It is the sense of silence at the end of Dan Pagis’s poem ‘written in pencil in a sealed railway car’ that draws us on: what does ‘eve’ wish us to tell cain, her other son? But the void cannot be penetrated: we have to provide that voice, or cope with its absence. This perhaps explains the slightly abbreviated tone of Tal Bruttman, Stefan Hördler, and Christoph Kreutzmüller in their spatial analysis of Lilli Jacob’s Album (pp. 137–166). As they concede, while the spatial analysis yields much, ‘Topography is not the centre of the album’s narrative and logic.’ (p. 164) In explaining the album as a illustration of how well the SS ‘organized the “flow” of the Jews and their dispossessed possessions against the backdrop of the camp’ (p. 164) they neglect the voids of representation within it: the gas chambers themselves, and the disposal of bodies. If demosntrating efficency was the goal, why not depict the ‘output’? I argue that the album was intended to act as a memory-object for the SS in an alternative postwar world in which Nazism prevailed, working within the tension of Himmler’s description of the murder of European Jewry as a ‘glorious page in our history and that has never been written and can never be written’. The void can sometimes be instructive without being investigated. That this treads a line between investigation and mystification is something that, as time goes on, we shall have to reconcile ourselves to. While this collection illustrates what rigorous and imaginative research can do to fill in even hard-to-recover gaps, we must not forget that there is, in the words of Roland Barthes, a reality from which we are sheltered. Those who could have told us of those ‘voids’ have either (following Primo Levi) returned mute or not returned at all. This excellent volume shows that there is much more to be said about the Holocaust, but it perhaps also highlights that we can allow ourselves to feel the silences as well.