ABOUT THIS BOOK

After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future collects sixteen essays written with the awareness that we are on the verge of a historical shift in our relation to the Third Reich’s programmatic genocide. Soon there will be no living survivors of the Holocaust, and therefore people not directly connected to the event must assume the full responsibility for representing it. The contributors believe that this shift has broad consequences for narratives of the Holocaust. By virtue of being “after” the accounts of survivors, storytellers must find their own ways of coming to terms with the historical reality that those testimonies have tried to communicate. The ethical and aesthetic dimensions of these stories will be especially crucial to their effectiveness. Guided by these principles and employing the tools of contemporary narrative theory, the contributors analyze a wide range of Holocaust narratives—fictional and nonfictional, literary and filmic—for the dual purpose of offering fresh insights and identifying issues and strategies likely to be significant in the future. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Anniken Greve, Jeremy Hawthorn, Marianne Hirsch, Irene Kacandes, Phillipe Mesnard, J. Hillis Miller, Michael Rothberg, Beatrice Sandberg, Anette H. Storeide, Anne Thelle, and Janet Walker.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Jakob Lothe is professor of English literature, University of Oslo. Susan Rubin Suleiman is the C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. James Phelan is Distinguished University Professor of English at The Ohio State University.

REVIEWS

“After Testimony is the first larger collective project that specifically and self-consciously employs narrative theory in its analysis of texts about the Holocaust, an undertaking that, in my opinion, is woefully overdue, especially given the ubiquity of narratological approaches in literary and cultural studies in general. For that reason alone, I think this volume will be of immense importance to the field of Holocaust Studies.” —Erin McGlothlin, associate professor of German and Jewish Studies, Washington University in St. Louis

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction—“After” Testimony: Holocaust Representation and Narrative Theory

Part I. The Powers and Limits of Fiction

1. Imre Kertesz’s Fatelessness: Fiction as Testimony

2. Challenges for the Successor Generations of German–Jewish Authors in Germany

3. Recent Literature Confronting the Past: France and Beyond

4. Performing a Perpetrator as Witness: Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes

5. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Backward Narration in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow

Part II. Intersections/Border Crossings

6. The Face-to-Face Encounter in Holocaust Narrative

7. Knowing Little, Adding Nothing: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Remembering in Espen Sobye’s Kathe, Always Lived in Norway

8. “When facts are scarce”: Authenticating Strategies in Writing by Children of Survivors

9. Objects of Return

10. Narrative, Memory, and Visual Image: W. G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur and Austerlitz

11. Which Narrative of Auschwitz? A Narrative Analysis of Laurence Rees’s Documentary Auschwitz: The Nazis and ‘the Final Solution’

12. Moving Testimonies: “Unhomed Geography” and the Holocaust Documentary of Return

Part III. The Holocaust and Others

13. From Auschwitz to the Temple Mount: Binding and Unbinding the Israeli Narrative

14. The Melancholy Generation: Grossman’s Book of Interior Grammar

15. Fractured Relations: The Multidirectional Holocaust Memory of Caryl Phillips

16. Hiroshima and the Holocaust: Tales of War and Defeat in Japan and Germany—A Contrastive Perspective