La Capra focused his talk on Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones, and Saul Friedlander’s combined works Nazi Germany and the Jews. Because I had not read either book, and because La Capra is a dense speaker even without his footnotes, I am certain that I did not understand the lecture in its entirety. However, having read up on both works and gone through my notes a couple of times, I do see themes and lines of argument that I find compelling in relation to the subject of trauma and the Holocaust.
Beginning with a critique of The Kindly Ones, La Capra notes the “radical ambiguity” presented in the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim. As a fictional “autobiography” of “passive homosexual” SS officer Maxamillian Aeu, La Capra asserted that The Kindly Ones could have taken a better look into perpetrator motivation. Part of Littell’s aim, La Capra said, was to cause the reader to identify with Aeu as a perpetrator.
Likening Littell’s literary ambiguity to Primo Levi’s “grey zone,” La Capra pointed out that in many cases, historical documentation is not the way to illuminate questions about the Holocaust. Poorly paraphrased, La Capra stated that historical documentation taken to excess darkens the darkness surrounding questions about the genocide, and that in many cases the more one knows, the more that darkness becomes impenetrable. La Capra suggested that Littell have taken more of an inquiry into Himmler’s closing speech to the SS generals, which he pointed to as the most intimate look into the perpetrator motivation in the Holocaust.
La Capra used the second part of his talk to discuss Saul Friedlander’s work around victims, trauma, and posttrauma. Discussing Friedlander’s concept of “redemptive anti-Semitism,” La Capra situated the Nazis’ hatred in a narrative that posits all history as related to the Jews as a negative force, with the idea that their extermination will eradicate that force.
Interestingly, La Capra pointed to Friedlander’s use of accessible language as a useful tool in evoking sentiments of disbelief in the reader, thus facilitating her identification with the victim. In the face of such horror, La Capra said, there is no point in using exaggerated language – the role of the inexplicable and the excessive are already clear in the story of the Holocaust.
La Capra critiques Friedlander, however, for failing to make use of oral testimony and video archives despite his stated concern for and focus on the voice. La Capra points out that there are many aspects of testimony that are not verbal – the pause, the sign, the emotional breakdown – that are invaluable literary and historical resources in the study of trauma. Further, Friedlander’s failure to address Palestine in a discussion of memory and its aftermath is a real shortcoming La Capra points to in his work on the Holocaust.
Closing his speech with these critiques of Friedlander’s work, La Capra calls for Friedlander’s concept of “redemptive anti-Semitism” to be situated in terms of a mood of excess surrounding the Nazi party. Emphasizing a “carnivalesque glee,” the quasi-divine leader, and the idea of purification and regimentation of a community through the extermination of outsiders, La Capra effectively commented on the environment of transgressive excess characterizing the period. However, as the talk came to a close I felt he could have said more about what that excess meant, especially in the context of current affairs. His nod to Palestine was compelling, but truncated, lacking any real accompanying commentary about what Friedlander’s focus on Palestine might look like, or even his own.
I have been limited in the past by a real inability to understand what La Capra is saying. He made a funny comment in his talk, that this particular lecture did need to be footnoted before it could be published. I think because I had not read the works he referred to, I was limited in my complete comprehension of the talk, but what I was able to understand I found to be very interesting. La Capra’s overall point was that more personalization needs to be done when looking into the Holocaust, to avoid looking at the period as a contained era of illegible horror. By putting the effort in to read the horror, and personalize both the victims and the perpetrator, a useful process of identification can begin to take place. What I would like La Capra to build on are the outlets for that identification – what would that project bring to contemporary historical studies, and specifically to the academy of Holocaust interpretation?
