Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, two broad frameworks for studying and representing the Holocaust emerged. The first, influenced by the broadcast of the Eichmann trial, the Holocaust miniseries, and the Holocaust Survivors Film project, emphasizes the centrality of personal testimonies and the importance of documenting. Films and novels within this tradition, such as Schindler’s List and the more recent Son of Saul, strive for the historical accuracy afforded by realist modes of representation. The second framework stresses the limits of language and representation. Influenced by trauma theory and characterized by the comments of the director of Shoah, Claude Lanzmann that “there is an absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding” (1991), this paradigm dominates the American and European academies. It is evident in films, books, and memorials characterized by fragmentation, abstraction, and minimalism, such as the Berlin Holocaust memorial. Yet, as Michael Rothberg has argued, the split between the realist and antirealist approaches reinforces what the survivor David Rousset called the Holocaust’s “concentrationary universe,” as a space entirely outside the bounds of society and yet defined by the brute, inescapable demands of existence (Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation, 116). The division between realism and antirealism thus prevents an understanding of how the Holocaust, a radically extreme and violent event, nevertheless emerged from the bounds of normal society.
Surrealism, by contrast, explicitly sought to collapse the distance between realism and antirealism by exploring how extreme, otherworldly experiences, such as dreams, fantasies, and the unconscious, manifest themselves in the everyday. Surrealism thus provides a lens through which to understand how extreme experiences that defy rational understanding express themselves in the routine, and how we can read historical objects as registering the traces of an irrecoverable trauma. In addition, surrealist aesthetics are marked by a self-consciousness that points to the process of representation, enabling new perspectives to emerge on Holocaust studies’ emphasis on representational limits. Surrealism in Europe was also historically proximate to the Holocaust, emerging in the interwar period and leading up to the advent of WWII, when many of its participants emigrated to the Americas, joined resistance movements, or were deported to and killed in camps.
This panel builds on scholarship about the relationship between modernism and the Holocaust. Scholars like the historian Hayden White have argued that the Holocaust is a ‘modernist’ event, because it upends generic and narrative conventions in a similar manner to cultural modernism (The Content of the Form, 1987). Works like Brett Kaplan’s Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation (2006) and Joshua Hirsch’s Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust (2003) have explored how modernist aesthetics influenced the work of writers and filmmakers like Paul Célan, Charlotte Delbo, and Alain Resnais. Within this corpus of scholarship, however, surrealist figures and surrealism, as a movement that emphasized the breakdown between the distinct realms of high and low culture, the otherworldly and the everyday, is rarely discussed.
To encourage discussion, the panel will include three 15-minute presentations. Kathryn Brackney will begin by setting out the wider framework of the debate. Her talk asks: Why do we remember the Holocaust through personal testimonies and visually minimal or fragmentary monuments in Western Europe, North America, and Israel? Before these transnational conventions for mourning victims of the Holocaust predominated, how did writers and artists represent the destruction of Europe’s Jewish communities? Her paper reveals an interplay between an understudied surreal and fantastic tradition of representation and more canonical modes of memorializing genocide. Through a particular focus on the interplay between otherworldly and domestic settings in the work of Avrom Sutzkever and Marc Chagall, she explores how the surreal aspects of “Planet Auschwitz” have shaped the humanizing domestic spaces of later documentary interviews.
Building on these methodological questions, Sven-Erik Rose shifts away from representations of the camp to the space of the ghetto as a site that provides a gateway between normative society and the extreme. He analyzes Piotr Rawicz’s post-war French novel Le Sang du ciel (1961), a Yiddish prose poem published by Avrom Sutzkever in 1953-54, and a Polish novella by Adolf Rudnicki (1937), written before the Holocaust, to demonstrate how their use of surrealistic imagery and eschewal of realist representational conventions stand apart from virtually the entire corpus of texts by survivor authors. While rejecting claims to historical facticity and referentiality, the self-consciously literary form of witnessing that these texts stage ultimately create possibilities for Holocaust remembrance that recognize the surreality inherent in the real.
Last, Megan Sulewski’s paper compliments the literary and visual focus of the previous two panels by exploring surrealist musical representations of the Holocaust. Rather than focusing on how music was performed or used in the camps, Sulewski explores the influence of surrealism’s aesthetic legacy on the composers Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage, and Pierre Boulez. Though not formally associated with surrealism, Cage’s In the Name of the Holocaust (1942), Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (1948), and Boulez’s Second Sonata (1947-48) bear all of the hallmarks of Surrealist creations: they completely dismantle previously-accepted norms, they use everyday objects in place of instruments, and they rely on harsh, atonal melodies to unnerve the listener. In contrast to the minimalist musical compositions of the late twentieth century, these pieces transform logical harmonic progressions into hysterical, cacophonous noise that mimicked the hysteria of genocide.
This panel brings Holocaust studies into dialogue with an understudied but omnipresent surrealist mode of representation. In doing so, it seeks to open up new directions in the representation and memorialization of the event beyond a programmatic demand for historical realism or an insistence of the limits of Holocaust representation.