Post-witnessing the concentration camps: Paul Auster's and Angela Morgan Cutler's investigative and imaginative encounters with sites of mass murder

ABSTRACT

This article offers a critical analysis of British writer Angela Morgan Cutler’s and Jewish American author Paul Auster’s accounts of their encounters with the Nazi sites of mass murder Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen. Having no personal connection to the history of the Holocaust, Cutler and Auster post-witness the past through experiencing contradictory sensorial and cognitive reactions to the memorial sites, which resemble cognitive dissonance.

Keywords:

• Post-witness
• postmemory
• imaginative and investigative activities
• the body and the mind
• death camps
• cognitive dissonance
• Auschwitz-Birkenau
• Bergen-Belsen

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Diana I. Popescu is a Research Fellow at the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck College, London. She currently researches performative methods of commemorating the Holocaust in Europe and Israel since the turn of the millennium. This research is funded by the Swedish Research Academy and is a collaboration with art historian Tanja Schult. Diana specializes in the memory and representation of the Holocaust in contemporary culture. She is the co-editor of the volume Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-witness Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

Notes

1. Gradowski, “Letter,” 75.

2. Post-witnessing as an activity that summons imaginative faculty, and the intertwined relationship between memory and imagination in artistic engagements with the Holocaust, is further developed in the introduction to Popescu and Schult, Representing the Holocaust.

3. Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” 107.

4. Ibid.

5. See scholarly works on dark tourism by Lennon and Foley, Derek Dalton, and Emma Willis; Jackie Feldman's work on Israeli students’ experiences at camps; and Tim Cole's work cited in this article.

6. Rutherford, “The Third Space,” 211.

7. Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 3.

8. Ibid., 112.

9. See works by Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance; and Lacan, “Symbol and Language” in The Language of the Self.

10. Many visual artists have worked through these stages of their experiences of visiting murder sites. See Tanja Schult's “To Go or Not to Go?”

11. For a detailed interpretation of writing processes and writing styles in Cutler's novel, see Rine, “Making the Silence Speak.”

12. Cutler, Auschwitz, 11.

13. Ibid., 9–10.

14. Ibid., 10.

15. Ibid., 9.

16. Ibid., 12.

17. Ibid., 13.

18. Feldman, “In Search,” 230.

19. Dalton, “Encountering Auschwitz,” 189.

20. Cutler, Auschwitz, 31.

21. Ibid.

22. See Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.

23. Cutler, Auschwitz, 17.

24. Ibid., 18.

25. See works by Tim Cole, Oren Baruch Stier, and James Young.

26. Cutler, Auschwitz, 18.

27. Shalev-Gerz's artistic engagement with material relics and the Holocaust is discussed at length by Jacob Lund and James E. Young, in Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era.

28. Cutler, Auschwitz, 90.

29. See Lacan, “Symbol and Language.”

30. Cutler, Auschwitz, 141.

31. Ibid., 231.

32. Ibid., 242.

33. Ibid., 231 (emphasis added).

34. Vogler quoted by Amanda Loos, ‘Symbolic, real, imaginary', University of Chicago online glossary, retrieved from http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/symbolicrealimaginary.htm, accessed on 20 February 2016.

35. Miller, 1981, 280.

36. Auster, Winter Journal, 147.

37. Ibid., 147–8.

38. Ibid., 148.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid., 148–9.

41. Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder, 38.