Diplomarbeit FINAL!

DIPLOMARBEIT Titel der Diplomarbeit „The ‘Third Reich’ memoir in the light of postmodern philosophy: historical representability and the gate- keeper’s task of ‘poetry after Auschwitz’“ Verfasserin Christine Schranz angestrebter akademischer Grad Magistra der Philosophie (Mag.phil.) Wien, 2010 Studienkennzahl lt. Studienblatt: A 343 Studienrichtung lt. Studienblatt: Anglistik und Amerikanistik Betreuerin: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Margarete Rubik Declaration of Authenticity I confirm to have conceived and written this paper in English all by myself. Quotation from sources are all clearly marked and acknowledged in the bibliographical references either in the footnotes or within the text. Any ideas borrowed and/or passages paraphrased from the works of other authors are truthfully acknowledged and identified in the footnotes. Christine Schranz Hinweis Diese Diplomarbeit hat nachgewiesen, dass die betreffende Kandidatin befähigt ist, wissenschaftliche Themen selbstständig sowie inhaltlich und methodisch vertretbar zu bearbeiten. Da die Korrekturen der Beurteilenden nicht eingetragen sind und das Gutachten nicht beiliegt, ist daher nicht erkenntlich, mit welcher Note diese Arbeit abgeschlossen wurde. Das Spektrum reicht von sehr gut bis genügend. Es wird gebeten, diesen Hinweis bei der Lektüre zu beachten. Acknowledgments Writing this thesis has been challenging and rewarding, and along the way I have been fortunate enough to have the help of friends and mentors. I would like to thank the following people for their contributions: Professor Rubik for trusting me on an “outside the box” topic, for pointing me in the right direction, for her editing and for many helpful suggestions. Doron Rabinovici for sharing his thoughts and research on history and fiction with me in an inspiring interview. Micah and Hillel Smith for pointing out thought-provoking aspects about ethics and Holocaust politics, and for showing me “both sides” of Israel. Ellie ten Wolde for reading and editing my final draft, and for helping me to look at literature and linguistics (and many other things) from a new perspective throughout my studies. Last but not least, I would like to thank Shimi, who provoked me into wanting to understand what truth and the past mean to people other than I. 7 Table of Contents 0 Introduction ...........................................................................................................................9 1 Limits and Possibilities of Narratology .............................................................................10 1.1 Logico-linguistic Approaches ......................................................................................10 1.2 Semantic Approaches...................................................................................................21 1.3 Pragmatic Approaches.................................................................................................21 2 A Critical Reflection on Postmodern Philosophies of History. .......................................23 2.1 Narrative “Effectiveness” and the Ethics of Relativism in the Light of Holocaust Denial...................................................................................................................................23 2.2 From White to Ankersmit ...........................................................................................27 2.3 Keith Jenkins: History and Ethics – “Why bother?” ...............................................31 2.4 The Merits of Postmodernism: Historical Relativism and the Planet Tlön............34 3 “Poetry after Auschwitz”....................................................................................................38 3.1 The Limits of Historiography......................................................................................38 3.2 An Eakinian/Benjaminian Approach .........................................................................41 3.3 Art Spiegelman: Transcending the Limits of Representation..................................42 3.3.1 Between Cinema and the Written Word: “the past is also what it is not.”......45 3.3.2 Anthropomorphic Characters..............................................................................49 3.3.3 Maus vs. “Holokitsch”: “I resist becoming the Elie Wiesel of the comic book.”.........56 3.3.4 A Postmodern Answer to the Culture Industry .................................................66 4 Problematic Texts................................................................................................................72 4.1 The Foundations of Institutionalized Memory ..........................................................73 4.4.1 The Construction of (American) Identities .........................................................74 4.4.2 The Interpretation of Political Landscapes.........................................................75 4.2 Elie Wiesel and the Culture Industry .........................................................................77 4.3 A History of Literary Fraud and “Holokitsch”.........................................................82 4.4 The Reception of Holocaust Fraud .............................................................................88 4.5 Norman Finkelstein and “‘The’ Holocaust Industry” ..............................................91 5 Conclusion..........................................................................................................................104 Bibliography..........................................................................................................................108 Index ......................................................................................................................................114 Appendix A: German abstract............................................................................................120 Appendix B: curriculum vitae.............................................................................................121 8 9 0 Introduction When one November 9th, I called my grandmother to ask how she had experienced the November pogrom in 1938 – still unsure how much of a Nazi she had really been, I formulated my question carefully in order to make her talk rather than remain silent –, there was a thoughtful pause. “The pogrom ...,” – she finally said, and I could sense her frown uneasily –, “what year was that again?” In our days, historical understanding is strained by a number of alarming tendencies. A selective historical memory is bequeathed in the families of culprits and followers, while our schools are still teaching versions of the Austrian “victim myth.” Inside the international ivory tower, there is an ongoing academic controversy among historians, Holocaust authors and literary critics, centering around the question of the “proper” representation and emplotment of National Socialism. In the last decades, a number of controversial literary and historical works have been published, Holocaust representability as such has been called into question, and the reliability of historical memory has been challenged. The literary work that first brought the unreliability of eyewitness testimonies to greater public attention was Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 novel The Painted Bird. In 1998, this question gained urgency with the scandal caused by the exposure of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s (Bruno Dössekker’s) professed autobiography Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood 1939-1948 (1995) as a work of fiction. In 2000, Norman G. Finkelstein used both these books as evidence in his case against “‘The’ Holocaust industry,” American Jewry and Israeli politics, while in the ivory tower’s narratology departments, scholars of literature continued to contemplate the differences of fact and fiction in search of textually inherent criteria to distinguish one from the other. A few weeks ago, yet another Holocaust autobiography scheduled for publication next month (February 2009) was exposed as a fraud: Herman Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence. In a parallel debate, suggesting the relativity and meta-narrative nature of all historical writing, Hayden White, F. R. Ankersmit and Keith Jenkins started providing grist to the mill of Holocaust deniers and revisionists in the 1970s. Among those revisionists are the literary scholar and Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson and the self-appointed historian David Irving, 10 who between 1963 and 2002 published thirty books significantly altering, distorting and denying World War II history. Finally, in 1998, London saw the climax of revisionism in Irving’s libel case against Deborah Lipstadt. This paper attempts to portray narratological and historical controversies about Holocaust writing, identify their links and reveal their political and ideological implications in and outside academics. In the first part, I shall ponder the differentiability of fact and fiction defended by narratologists and questioned by postmodernist historiographers. In the second part, I will focus on Holocaust biographies and autobiographies and illustrate that, as Doron Rabinovici has noted, “[b]eyond the scientific handicraft, there lie the possibilities of [a] literature that does not even pretend to only depict the facts. It is for that reason that [literature] can approximate a truth exceeding all reality without betraying it” (“Wie es war,” my translation). 1 Limits and Possibilities of Narratology 1st premise: A B 2nd premise: B C Inference: A C (Modus Barbara) Martin Löschnigg defines three kinds of approaches to the differentiability of factual

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