‘Disrupted Narratives’: Lawrence Langer’s Explorations of Deep Memory in Holocaust Testimonies

ABSTRACT

Lawrence Langer has played a foundational role in foregrounding the importance of examining Holocaust testimonies in their own right, as singularly textured personal remembrances, not only as historical sources to be read for their transcripts by historians and other scholars of the Holocaust. At its centre, Langer’s body of work over five decades emphasizes the anti-redemptive experiences and ‘choiceless choices’ of those who survived the Holocaust. He underscores how testimony can begin to reveal what life was like for witnesses under circumstances that systematically undermined moral and ethical values. Rather than imposing heroic or healing narratives on testimonies, his analytical approach is directed towards training our eyes and ears to how witnesses express the anguished, humiliated, and shattered aspects of their experiences. While it is impossible for anyone other than a survivor to fully comprehend what he or she went through, Langer makes the compelling case that interviewers and audiences are nonetheless obliged to try to understand survivors, all the while acknowledging the impossibility of doing so. In that sense, Langer foregrounds the paradoxical nature of giving and receiving testimonies. He advocates for modes of intimately conducting and interpreting testimonies with witnesses without being appropriative of their experiences; while deeply invested in receiving the testimonies of others, he nonetheless recognizes the experiential rift that separates witnesses from those who bear witness to their recollections. This essay foregrounds the importance of Langer’s explorations of the lacunae and tensions that mark testimonies, particularly as they manifest in the interplay between ‘common memory’ and ‘deep memory.’ Langer’s analysis of that dynamic profoundly shapes not only the ways we document and interpret testimonies of the Holocaust, but also those of other genocides.

KEYWORDS:

• Holocaust and Genocide Studies
• Testimony
• Trauma

Correction Statement

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

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributor

Noah Shenker is the N. Milgrom and 6a Foundation Senior Lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide Studies within the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University.

Notes

1 Lawrence Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 46.

2 Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. x.

3 Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), p. xi. Langer writes the introduction to this, the second edition of Delbo’s book, and reflects there on the influence of her conceptualization of memory.

4 Lawrence Langer, The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), p. 203.

5 Ibid., p. 206.

6 Ibid.

7 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. xi.

8 Correspondence and Analysis of Fortunoff Archive Testimonies from Lawrence Langer to Michael Berenbaum, 4 April 1991, Subject Files of the Director Michael Berenbaum, 1989–1997, 1988-011, Box 20, Lawrence Langer, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, Research Institute, Washington, DC.

9 Ibid.

10 Saul Friedländer, “Trauma, Memory, and Transference,” in Geoffrey Hartman, (ed.), Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), p. 254.

11 Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 172.

12 Patricia Yaeager, “Testimony Without Intimacy,” Poetics Today, vol. 27, no. 2 (Summer 2006): p. 402.

13 Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. x.

14 Ibid., p. xiv.

15 Ibid., p. xv.

16 Ibid., p. 3.

17 Ibid., pp. 3–4.

18 Ibid., pp. 5–6.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., p. 30.

22 Ibid., p. 31.

23 Ibid., p. 32.

24 Ibid., pp. 8–9.

25 Ibid.

26 Correspondence and Analysis of Fortunoff Archive Testimonies from Lawrence Langer to Michael Berenbaum, 4 April 1991.

27 Amit Pinchevski, Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 47.

28 Langer expressed his trepidations in remarks that he delivered at the “Symposium to Honor Dr. Dori Laub” held at Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University and attended by the author on 20 November 2018.

29 Lawrence Langer, Using and Abusing the Holocaust (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 126–7.

30 Pinchevski, Transmitted Wounds, p. 53.

31 Ibid., pp. 53–5.

32 Ibid., p. 55.

33 Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015).

34 Ibid., p. 2.

35 Rabbi Baruch G. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-295), Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

38 Correspondence and Analysis of Fortunoff Archive Testimonies from Lawrence Langer to Michael Berenbaum, 4 April 1991.

39 Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 23.

40 Rabbi Baruch G. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-295).

41 Neil Levi, “‘No Sensible Comparison’? The Place of the Holocaust in Australia’s History Wars,” History & Memory, vol. 19, no. 1 (2007): p. 130.

42 Ibid., p. 145.

43 Lawrence Langer, “The Alarmed Vision: Social Suffering and Holocaust Atrocity,” Daedalus, vol. 125, no. 1 (1996): p. 53.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid., p. 54.

46 Ibid., p. 55.

47 Langer, Using and Abusing the Holocaust, p. 94.

48 Brita Lokting, “Meet the World’s First 3-D Interactive Holocaust Survivor,” The Forward, 24 November 2018, https://forward.com/culture/324989/meet-the-worlds-first-3-d-interactive-holocaust-survivor/.

49 Pinchevski, Transmitted Wounds, p. 109.

50 Ibid.

51 The DiT project is the subject of a co-authored research collaboration involving the author and Dan Leopard. The first iteration of that collaborative research will appear in the chapter “Pinchas Gutter: The Figure of Holocaust Testimony as Embodied Archive and Interactive Documentary” in Avinoam Patt and Erin McGlothlin, (eds.), Lessons and Legacies, Vol. XV (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming). Our findings regarding the “user-driven” editing strategy of the Dimensions in Testimony Project were gathered during interviews with Stephen Smith, the executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, held in his office at the University of Southern California in January 2016.