Introduction

ABSTRACT

This special issue of the Journal of Holocaust Research is dedicated to Professor Lawrence Langer on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. In the introduction we trace the enormous impact of Prof. Langer’s work on Holocaust Studies, noting how his ideas have inspired scholars working in several disciplines. After Prof. Langer’s autobiographical reflections on working as a scholar of the Holocaust for many decades, the following articles address issues relating to Holocaust literature, the collection and interpretation of Holocaust testimonies, Holocaust film and photography. They discuss examples ranging from Romania to France, American culture and Polish Jewry, and all illustrate how Prof. Langer’s ideas continue to enrich and enliven research and debates in Holocaust Studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Lawrence L. Langer
• Holocaust
• testimony
• memory

Interviewed at his home on 4 February 2015,¹ Lawrence Langer answers the door with a book in his hand: Helga Schneider’s Let Me Go, a gripping tale of her mother, who abandoned her family in 1941 to join the war against the Jews and become an SS guard at Nazi concentration camps. Langer gets to the point: ‘Why does the mother say Germans were there when the camp was liberated? Everyone knows that the Germans had abandoned the camp two weeks before. This makes me wonder about the validity of the entire book.’ This is not an unusual comment for Langer. For over 50 years, he has rigorously pursued the real story of the Holocaust: in literature, art, film, and, perhaps most importantly, Holocaust testimonies.

Langer was born to Irving and Esther (Strauss) Langer in the Bronx in 1929. He describes his intellectual trajectory toward becoming one of the foremost scholars of the Holocaust in the beautiful essay that opens this special issue, ‘My Life with Holocaust Death.’ When asked about his interest in the Holocaust, he goes back in time to an apartment building in the Bronx, where he lived with his parents and sister. He remembers that in the early 1940s, a German Jewish family moved in upstairs. The boys’ names were Ziggy and Paul. They were immigrants. Langer says he did not know consciously that they were refugees, but ‘nonetheless something about the Holocaust was already embedded in me. What were they doing there?’

He goes on to speculate that his academic interest in the Shoah continued to develop when he was a teaching fellow at Harvard in a course on ‘Ideas of Good and Evil in Western Literature.’ He was drawn to the study of evil before he turned to study the Holocaust. He remembers that there were six or seven teaching fellows, ‘many of whom are dead now.’

Fast-forward to his first year as a professor of English at Simmons College. The president of Hillel came to Langer on the anniversary of the end of World War II in 1960, fifteen years after the war. She said that the students affiliated with Hillel wanted someone to speak about the Holocaust with them. Langer had read books about what happened, but he was reluctant. He figured he’d better find out something about this topic. He read Night by Elie Wiesel. It had just come out. He also read a novel called The Last of the Just by André Schwarz-Bart, which had been published in English in 1960, a year after its original publication in French. He did a bit of research on Nazi education. Before long (1965), he would teach the first course on Holocaust literature in the United States.

Three years later, Langer was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to teach in Austria. He and his wife were driving from Salzburg to Vienna for orientation for all Fulbright scholars in Austria and they saw a sign for Mauthausen: ‘I asked my wife, “Should we look?” We went up a steep hill. It was not a death camp, though there was a small gas chamber. There was no museum; you just walked around.’ Back in Salzburg, Langer went for a haircut and was reading a newspaper when his eye caught the headline ‘Former SS returns home.’ The SS man was released in Italy: ‘He finally got out in 1963. They treated it as if a hero was returning. I said to my wife “I don’t know how to interpret this.” These little things.’ Langer’s interest in ‘these little things’ helped to shape him into the scholar he became.

The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (1975) was the first study of Holocaust literature published in the United States. The next books were published almost as soon as they were completed: The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature (1978), Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (1982), Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (1991), Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (1995), and Preempting the Holocaust (1998). Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology (1995), an edited collection, is still taught in Holocaust courses. Langer’s most famous notion, of ‘choiceless choice,’ was coined in an essay published in 1980 and has become one of the fundamental concepts in Holocaust Studies.² The term refers to a decision about how to act in situations in the ghettos or the camps where no real decision was possible. In an interview, he explains:

A woman in the ghetto has enough medicine to treat one patient, but both her husband and his brother are sick. Should she give her husband the medicine, or divide it between the two brothers? Elie Wiesel stands next to his father while a Kapo beats his father. If he intervenes, he will be beaten. If he does not intervene, he must watch his father be beaten. The choices are between bad and worse.

Langer is one of the few Holocaust scholars from any discipline who has coined a term that has entered the lexicon of Holocaust scholarship.

Langer’s 1991 Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, based on his study of survivors’ oral histories in Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimony, closely examines the verbal, visual, psychological, and intellectual elements of the testimonies. He conducted 88 of the 4,400 Fortunoff Video Archives’ interviews himself, and the book won a National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the ‘Ten Best Books of 1991’ by the New York Times Book Review. It was the first scholarly book to study survivors’ testimonies as a vehicle for understanding the Holocaust and remains a key text.

Did Langer emerge on the scene just when people were finally beginning to talk about the Holocaust? No, he argues, it is not true that people didn’t talk about the Holocaust for decades: ‘It’s just that nobody wanted to listen.’ He recalls that Geoffrey Hartman’s wife told him that people didn’t want to listen to her story, either. Eventually she stopped trying to tell it for decades.

Langer learned much of what he knows about Holocaust testimonies from the experience of conducting and watching hundreds of interviews himself. He recalls how the interviewees shaped and reshaped his ideas, how his own position emerged from the interviewing and re-watching the experience. Sometimes the interviews invaded his personal life. He laughs as he remembers that when he began watching videotaped Holocaust testimonies in 1984, his wife told him that they were not going to watch any more testimonies before bed or they would have to have separate rooms. After that, he chuckles, his viewing experiences took place in his office, during the day.

To watch and conduct so many interviews about the Holocaust is to arrive at an inestimable archive of evidence. But some stories remain in the foreground. Langer often recalls watching the testimony of a woman (Bessie K.) who described waiting in a long line with her baby concealed under her arm. Just as they go to the front of the line, the baby coughed. The officer asked, ‘What have you got there?’ That, she says, is ‘the last time I saw my bundle.’

For Langer, the story came to signify something very important about memory and time. He eventually connected it to something he heard from his friend Charlotte Delbo. Delbo’s own book Auschwitz and After (1985), and the ideas embedded in it, helped him understand what another survivor meant when she said, ‘Since that time I think that all my life I have been alone.’ He explains that the moment when the baby is taken away has no future and no past—‘It just exists.’ Today we might cast this in terms of trauma theory, but decades ago Langer drew it from Delbo and called it ‘deep memory.’

Langer takes out one of several letters he received from Charlotte Delbo, carefully removing it from its envelope. In the first letter, she calls him ‘Professor,’ and then ‘Larry’ in the others. Lost in thought, he muses, ‘Charlotte Delbo stayed here, in this house. In Auschwitz, she had no water for 70 days with repeated dysentery. There is no way you or I can imagine what Delbo experienced.’ Thinking about his conversations with Delbo spurs other memories:

People ask, ‘Why didn’t they do something?’ They could not. A guy arrives with his family, and they send half the family to the left and half to the right. He thought his brother should be with his parents, so he told him, ‘Go to Mommy and Daddy,’ and he did. The survivor falters and chokes out, ‘I killed my brother.’ He really believes he was in control of the decision. He didn't know where they would be going. He said he felt so guilty. I didn’t argue with him, but it wasn't his fault. That was 40 years later when he was telling me the story.

Asked about the art of conducting an effective Holocaust interview, Langer insists that we must understand that the survivors are the experts:

Things come up that you won’t be prepared for. What do you do when a survivor loses his voice during the interview? How to be understanding? You have to know what to say and how to handle it. It is possible to make too much of chronology. You let them guide the direction, and if they want to jump from 1938 to 1942, you let them jump because that is how their mind is working. Great art breaks chronology.

When Chaim Engel, a survivor of Sobibor, agreed to be interviewed by the Fortunoff Archive, Langer was selected to interview him. It is one of the most important interviews in the archive, because there were so few survivors of the Sobibor uprising. In an interview, Langer remembers:

When I interviewed him, maybe ten were left, maybe eight. I knew about Sobibor and I knew certain things I wanted to ask him. He described how his job was to kill an SS officer. He said he wanted to say, ‘This is for my mother. This is for my father.’ Chaim was not afraid to disagree with me, and that is good. He exposed my naiveté. Chaim taught me something about language and understanding. He said, ‘I could tell you 100 times, but if you weren’t there you could not understand. My words do not convey what it was really like. But we want people to know, so I talk.’³

Langer insists that survivors know their stories and don't need to be encouraged by their interviewers. He does not like scripted questions for interviews or interviewers who prompt survivors to relive the past in the present. He offers the story of a survivor who said, near the end of the interview, ‘I want to share my story with someone who knows me really. It is not easy. It’s not easy to live that way.’ This comment offered Langer a new kind of consciousness of the ‘afterdeath,’ or death in life, of the Holocaust.

Langer’s fierce rejection of redemptive messages in the study of the Holocaust begins with the reality that people died for no reason. It was senseless, relentless genocide. He insists that we see atrocity for what it is, eschewing triumphant endings like those in Schindler’s List or Viktor Frankl’s ‘will to meaning.’ Lots of people tried to survive, Langer insists. ‘They were resolute and struggled mightily. But nonetheless, they died. If they survived? Pure luck.’ He also discourages generalizations about survivors: ‘It depends on what your life is like. One of the things I learned was never to use the term “most people,” because I have no idea what “most people” refers to.’

In 1992, after more than three decades of teaching, Langer retired from Simmons in order to have more time to write. In the past decade, he has added a focus on art to his work on testimonies and memory. He has written long critical essays for eleven volumes in collaboration with Holocaust survivor and artist Samuel Bak, offering a keen analysis of the religious and spiritual themes in Bak’s paintings as well as their visual meanings. A book of his new essays on the Holocaust, The Afterdeath of the Holocaust, from which his essay in this special issue is excerpted, is forthcoming.⁴

In many of his public addresses, Langer returns to stories like those of Chaim Engel, Charlotte Delbo, and Edith P. He also revisits the testimony of Edith P., parts of which he can quote by heart. She said that in Auschwitz, the sun was black: ‘It was never bright.’⁵ Describing her voyage on the train from Auschwitz in the winter of 1944, she said that she looked out the window at a stop in a German village. A group of German children and their mothers stood on the platform. ‘She asked herself,’ Langer lowers his voice, ‘Is there such a thing as love?’

Lawrence Langer’s impact on Holocaust Studies goes well beyond the study of literature and testimonies, although these are, of course, the primary loci in which his work has been most discussed. One cannot open a book that deals with any aspect of Holocaust memory, testimony, or literature without encountering not only Langer’s name but also a discussion of his ideas. Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams’ most recent book on the Auschwitz Sonderkommando,⁶ for example, discusses Langer in the contexts of specific testimonies and the tension between survivor memory and historical fact, and the gendered dimension of the testimony-giving process (the relationship between the interviewer and interviewee, for example). They emphasize the need for an ethical approach to oral testimony in which the interviewee’s words are treated with respect and not subject to editing. Langer’s ideas are taken up in essays on comparisons between the Holocaust and Canada’s Residential School system⁷; in studies of the impact of the digital world on the giving, recording, and storage of Holocaust testimonies⁸; and in works that have recently rediscovered some of the earliest recorded Holocaust testimonies, such as those taken by David Boder or the postwar historical commissions set up in DP camps or fledgling research institutions.⁹ Langer’s ideas are sometimes criticized today, especially by scholars of testimony who argue that his advocacy of videotaped testimonies as offering an ‘unmediated text’ fails to attend to the ways in which oral testimonies are ‘conditional, informed by differences in time, setting, medium, and audience, among other factors,’¹⁰ or by those who chide him for overlooking the significance of audio testimonies recorded after the war.¹¹ Whatever the validity of these criticisms, Langer’s insights and his hard-boiled yet empathic approach to Holocaust literature and testimony set the stage for contemporary analyses.

Beyond the broad fields of ‘memory studies’ and Holocaust literature, Langer is one of the rare scholars in literature whose work has been taken on board by historians of the Holocaust, who, in marked contrast to historians in other sub-fields, have until recently been reluctant to engage with concepts and methods from outside of their discipline.¹² From ‘keywords’ (‘choiceless choice’) to an anti-redemptive sensibility that doesn’t flinch from approaching the horror at the heart of the Holocaust story, Langer has supplied historians and other Holocaust scholars with a set of terms and concepts that have proven remarkably durable and productive. Christopher Browning, for example, discusses the Judenräte (Jewish Councils) in the ghettos of Nazi-occupied Poland in terms of ‘choiceless choice,’ and he appeals to this notion again at the end of his analysis of the Starachowice labor camp.¹³ In her study of music in the Holocaust, Shirli Gilbert approvingly cites Langer to defend her own anti-redemptive reading of the role played by music in the ghettos and camps, writing, ‘Langer has rightly pointed out that the term “staying alive” is more appropriate than the consoling and value-laden “survival.”’¹⁴ Historians and scholars of the Holocaust of all varieties have found Langer’s ideas critical to their own understanding of it.

This claim is illustrated by the articles in this issue, all of which owe some of their inspiration to Langer’s work, and each of which develops it in different disciplinary ways, whether through literature, history, film studies or memory studies, and whether they focus on testimony, photography, film, or fiction. The articles each indicate how Langer’s insights have proved and remain productive for scholars of the Holocaust, in terms of careful analyses of minutiae and in terms of addressing large questions of methods, sources, and explanatory frameworks.

The issue opens with Langer’s own reflection on ‘My Life with Holocaust Death,’ combining autobiographical meditations with a dazzling display of his critical acumen, bringing up many of the problems in Holocaust Studies that are addressed by the subsequent articles. He is followed first by a celebration of his achievements by Joanne Rudof, a longstanding friend of Langer’s and the former archivist of the Fortunoff Archive at Yale. Above all, she highlights Langer’s ‘symbiotic’ relationship with the Fortunoff Archive and credits him with having made the academic study of Holocaust testimonies into the major field of research it has become today.

Jennifer Geddes engages in her article directly with Langer’s work, especially with his famous notion of ‘choiceless choice.’ Geddes argues that this phrase, which she compares with Primo Levi’s poem ‘Shema,’ ‘function[s] to undo a misplaced certainty with which we respond to Holocaust testimonies.’ By this she means that Levi and Langer make us see that the terminology we use to respond to Holocaust testimony—words such as ‘human’ or ‘choice’—hide from us how shockingly different the world that Holocaust victims inhabited was from our own. In Geddes’ opinion, these concepts need ‘to be radically questioned and reconfigured by the realities experienced by victims of the Holocaust.’

Sara Horowitz illustrates Geddes’ point through a close reading of Sarah Kofman’s autobiographical text Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (1994). She argues that ‘Kofman’s struggle to come to terms with her past underwrites the shape and direction of her thinking throughout her academic career—even about seemingly unrelated issues.’ Following Langer’s instruction in Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory to pay attention to ‘deep memory,’ Horowitz reads Kofman’s memoir as beckoning us to consider it ‘through the psychoanalytic reading practices of its author, and to reread her other, more academic or philosophical writing, as mediated autobiography, juxtaposed with her autobiographical account.’

Noah Shenker similarly builds on Langer’s insights in his article on Holocaust testimonies. Taking as his starting point Langer’s distinction between ‘deep memory’ and ‘common memory,’ Shenker shows how Langer’s intellectual legacy has shaped ‘current and future efforts to preserve and analyze accounts of the Holocaust and other genocides.’ Shenker goes further, however, analyzing the ways in which the institutional frameworks of testimony-collecting organizations also shape the witnesses’ and viewers’ expectations of testimony, and he argues that ‘through close and repeated viewings of Holocaust testimonies we can responsibly forge an interpersonally charged connection with witnesses, all the while preserving recognition of the experiential divide between us.’

Continuing this theme, Dawn Skorczewski and Dan Stone focus on one well-known witness to the Holocaust, the Polish underground courier Jan Karski, to show how his testimony both changes and remains constant over time, in different institutional contexts. They stress in particular how, as he became more of a ‘celebrity witness,’ Karski became more confident in his ‘performance,’ from appearing professorial in his interview with Langer for the Yale Fortunoff Archive to becoming more animated in his later interview for the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, which was conducted by Holocaust survivor Renée Firestone.

Focusing on the visual, the last two articles take up problems related to film and photography. In his article on the Americanization of the Holocaust in film, a topic on which Langer wrote as early as 1983, Barry Langford argues that Langer’s essay on ‘Americanization’ is more restrained and more rigorous than those of many later scholars. He argues that the issue of Americanization is more complex than it first appears and, in a close reading of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), suggests that that film ‘“Americanizes” the Holocaust in ways that radically revise and invert altogether—or, alternatively, might actually be seen as a provocative reaffirmation of—Langer’s original proposition.’

Finally, Gabriel N. Finder examines the photograph album Zagłada żydostwa polskiego: Album zdjęć; Extermination of Polish Jews: Album of Pictures, one of the first postwar publications of the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland. Aiming primarily to bring the album to light as a little-known but vital document, Finder argues that the album ‘is, above all, a visual embodiment of what Lawrence Langer, in his discussion of Holocaust testimonies, calls “unheroic memory” or the “memory of the diminished self.”’ As Finder’s example shows, historians as well as literary and film scholars have learned much from Langer; his cross-disciplinary impact is not only rare but has been sustained and highly productive.

Lawrence Langer turned 90 in June 2019. It is in great admiration and appreciation for the inestimable contribution of this great scholar to the field of Holocaust Studies and in gratitude for his friendship to and guidance of younger scholars like ourselves that we dedicate this special issue of Journal of Holocaust Research, whose articles invoke and are inspired by his prolific scholarship, to Lawrence Langer on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes on contributors

Gabriel N. Finder is professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Virginia.

Dawn Skorczewski is Research Professor of English Emerita, Brandeis University. Her recent book is Sieg Maandag: Life and Art in the Aftermath of Bergen-Belsen (Lecturis, 2020). She writes about Holocaust testimonies, trauma, poetry and resilience.

Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including the forthcoming Fascism, Nazism and the Holocaust: Challenging Histories (Routledge, 2021) and Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after the Holocaust and World War II (OUP, 2021).

Notes

1 All quotations from Lawrence Langer in this introduction are from Dawn Skorczewski’s interviews with Langer from 2015 to 2019.

2 Lawrence L. Langer “The Dilemma of Choice in the Death Camps,” Centerpoint: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 4, no. 1 (1980): pp. 53–59; reprinted in John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum, (eds.), Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications (New York: Paragon House, 1989), pp. 222–232.

3 Chaim E. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1326), Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

4 Lawrence L. Langer, The Afterdeath of the Holocaust (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

5 Edith P. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-107). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

6 Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams, The Auschwitz Sonderkommando: Testimonies, Histories, Representations (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 177, 191, 225.

7 Dorota Glowacka, “‘Never Forget’: Intersecting Memories of the Holocaust and the Settler Colonial Genocide in Canada,” in Shirli Gilbert and Avril Alba, (eds.), Holocaust Memory and Racism in the Postwar World (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019), p. 396.

8 Jeffrey Shandler, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), p. 31.

9 Alan Rosen, The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Hannah Polin-Galay, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); Laura Jockusch. Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

10 Shandler, Holocaust Memory, p. 84.

11 Rosen, The Wonder of Their Voices, p. 151.

12 See Dan Stone, “Introduction: The Holocaust and Historical Methodology,” in Dan Stone, (ed.), The Holocaust and Historical Methodology (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), pp. 1–19.

13 Christopher R. Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), pp. 35, 298.

14 Shirli Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 9–10.