H-NET BOOK REVIEW

H-NET BOOK REVIEW

Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (July 2006)

Bettina Bannasch and Almuth Hammer, eds. _Verbot der Bilder--Gebot

der Erinnerung: Mediale Repräsentationen der Schoah_. Frankfurt am Main:

Campus Verlag, 2004. 418 pp. EUR 39.90 (paper), ISBN: 3-593-37485-4.

Reviewed for H-German by Stefan Gunther, Georg Washington University

The Shoah--Theorizing the Boundaries of Representation and Tracking

Pluridisciplinary Representations

Saul Friedländer, in his introduction to his seminal collection, _Probing the

Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution"_, posed the

fundamental epistemological conflict that has informed much subsequent

writing about representing the Holocaust: "[t]here are limits to [the

Holocaust's] representation _which should not be but can easily be

transgressed._ What the characteristics of such a transgression are,

however, is far more intractable than our definitions have so far been able

to encompass."[1] While the Friedländer volume explored primarily the

representations of the Holocaust in historiography, Bannasch and Hammer

have attempted to cast a wider net by including essays from the following

disciplines: philosophy, sociology, psychology, pedagogy, history, art

history, media studies, musicology, literary history, cultural studies and

religion. The specific representational "limits" this volume examines are

located in the thorny relationship between the biblical injunction against

graven images on one hand and representations of the Holocaust in a

multiplicity of media on the other.

The authors' preface states that claims of the unrepresentability of the

Holocaust are often justified on a "quasi-theological" basis, namely

the biblical injunction against images (p. 9). The authors argue that the

invocation of this principle, especially in a critical context that

intermingles esthetic and ethical aspects of the question, can result

in an unwarranted appropriation of the concept, especially when the

specifically Jewish nature of the injunction is emphasized (pp. 9-10).

Furthermore, they qualify any claims to a global validity of such an

injunction in the context of the Holocaust by stating that it does not

extend to a generic "proscription of pictorial representation" but

represents a "prohibition of appropriation qua representation" (p.10).

"Thus," they argue, "the question shifts its emphasis from the injunction

against images itself towards argumentative strategies within the

context of the injunction and the rhetorical deployment of images"

(p. 10).

This authorial acknowledgment combines uneasily with the implicit

diametric opposition between the terms cited in the book's title. Indeed,

discourse about the limits of Holocaust representation has not been

characterized by an adherence to claims that would apodictically

extend the injunction against images towards any representation;

rather, it explores parameters for distinguishing between adequate

and inadequate modes of representation, while devising a critical

framework to answer this question.

The authors (and their contributors) seem to be aware of these

dynamics as well: most contributions to this volume acknowledge what

Manfred Köppen and Klaus R. Scherpe describe as "the knowledge

that every form of shaped memory always already implies

interpretation" (p. 1).[2] The following paragraphs will provide a

synoptic treatment of the most important contributions' arguments

vis-à-vis this thetic statement.

Jens Mattern focuses on the work of Emmanuel Lévinas, examining

the causation and emergence through Nazi persecution of a specifically

Jewish, "metaphysical election" (p. 25). He argues that, according to

Lévinas, Nazi antisemitism triggered an "anamnetic process of

dissimilation" (p. 29) and created a "situation in which [Jews] can

once more remember the metaphysical meaning of their Being which

had been cast aside by the modern process of assimilation" (p. 31).

In this reading, the Holocaust occasions the re-emergence of "Jewish

Being as that Being in which inescapable facticity changes into

utmost freedom" (p. 37).

Christina Pfestroff attempts to qualify critical notions that connect

Jean-François Lyotard's notion of the unrepresentable with injunctions

against graven images. She argues instead that "Lyotard's discourse

does not contain a general proscription against images. Rather, one

can and must speak of a commandment to present images in

Lyotard's work" (p. 45). She sees Lyotard's claim about the

unrepresentable as "less normative than descriptive" (p. 57) and

describes Lyotard's argument that all "instances of witnessing leave

false marks because in every such act the impact of traumatic

experience is neutralized" (p. 59). This dynamic, she claims, should

not lead to eschewing representation, however: "according to

Lyotard, no act of witnessing--be it linguistic, embodied, or artistic--frees

us from the necessity of reflection on what cannot be represented in

it" (p. 60).

The final article in the book's first section, "Justifications for the

Injunction against Images," analyzes how the injunction against images plays itself out in

Theodor W. Adorno's work. Andreas Langenohl argues that it would

be erroneous to "interpret the relationship between the injunction against

images in [Adorno's] critical theory and Jewish theological traditions as a

genuinely theological/metaphysical one" (p. 78). Rather, he sees a

"specifically materialistic appropriation of such traditions that view cultural

forms of expression as an option, to be taken seriously ... of overcoming a

bad material reality" (p. 78). According to Langenohl, Adorno makes the

case for a utopian world in which "the utopian cancellation of past harm

would not aim at an _ex post facto_ bestowal of meaning but at an

acknowledgement of the historical senselessness of the sacrifices made

during forms of domination that have been overcome" (p. 80).

Collectively, these three articles provide an interesting theoretical basis

for the following contributions, which focus primarily on specific

instances of representations in various disciplines. However, I would

have hoped for a more sustained theoretical treatment of the questions

surrounding the representability of the Holocaust; the focus on Lévinas,

Lyotard and Adorno--while certainly addressing significant contributions

to studies about the Holocaust and representation--seems somewhat

arbitrary and skirts more recent theoretical work on these questions.

The main focus of the remaining essays is visual: Matthias Heyl, Ursula

Stenger, Habbo Knoch, Martin Schulz, Paul Petzel and Detlef Hoffman

offer contributions that examine the production and dissemination of

images of the Holocaust, along with their attending epistemological

and ethical dimensions.

Heyl provocatively lays out the possibility that the injunction against

images could be "aimed not only at a respectful approach to [Holocaust]

history, where the injunction denotes the limitations of our capacity for

representation, understanding and cognition, but also at its own,

maybe perhaps especially elaborated, form of denial" (p. 118). Referring

to a tendency to "not wanting to understand" (p. 121), he sees the

danger of warnings against images primarily as an "erasure of

memory" (p. 123). Therefore, he posits a generic proscription of

representation only in cases where the presentation of images

could lead to the further dehumanization of the victim (p. 129).

Ursula Stenger argues that photographic images "touch [the viewer]

emotionally and elicit participation" (p. 132). Thus, images can play an

important role in "sensitizing [the viewer's] capacities of perception"

towards empathy (p. 145). Knoch points to the paradox of "positing

that the Holocaust is unrepresentable," while it is "constantly

documented visually for the purposes of historical enlightenment"

(p. 168). Photographs are in the latter process transformed from

"visual documents" into "objects of memory" (p. 168). More precisely,

Knoch sees photographs as elements of "'counter memory,' whenever

they sustain the principles of bearing witness and demonstrability in

the sense of visual proof" (p. 188).

Schulz reflects on the hybrid representational nature of photographs

of the Holocaust: on one hand they invoke "hallucinatorily clear evidence

of the re-presentation ... of a past presence," while on the other they

also stand for the "impossibility of making visible and tangible the

entire representation of a past, which in a photograph appears merely

as an detail and is always based on the absence of what occurred" (p.

204). Photographs, by virtue of their dual nature as historical documents

and flexibly deployable "iconographic _données_" (p. 205) can serve the

important function of sharpening our critical approach with images at

large. Showing photographs of the Holocaust makes visible the

"crossing gazes exchanged between perpetrators, victims and

recipients" (p. 206). In a similar vein, Petzel pleads for a "memorative

esthetics of acknowledgment" that would combine "a critique of the

image as idol with the development of a sense for the pathic within

an image, i.e., the sense for the lasting otherness of those

remembered, as well as the otherness that remains" (p. 376).

Hoffmann states that "images and symbols are necessary for the

organization of everyday reality" and in this context analyzes the impact

a potential prohibition of images would exert on remembering historical

events (p. 384). He concludes that the "impossibility to represent

experience" is a hallmark of trauma and that "omitted symbolization

is detrimental to traumatized individuals" (p. 396). Consequently,

he sees the visual and linguistic confirmation of what complicates

individual acts of memory as helpful in relieving trauma.

The volume also contains two articles on psychology: Julia Chaitin

and Dan Bar-On examine memory about family relationships during the

Holocaust and the survivors' incapacity to discuss what the authors

term "emotional memory" (p. 89). Revital Ludewig-Kedmi discusses

internally and externally conditioned rules for and prohibitions against

narrating Holocaust experiences, focusing on Holocaust survivors;

Jewish Kapos; perpetrators; those who saved Jews; and latter-day

recipients of those narratives. A media studies approach is offered by

Moshe Zimmerman, who analyzes representations in 1930s and 1940s

Hollywood movies of Nazi Germany, and Rembert Hüser, who provides

a close reading of Jean-Luc Godard's "Une Femme mariée" [1964].

Eckhard Tramsen scrutinizes the ambiguous role of silence in music

that thematizes the Holocaust, while Bettina Schlüter examines the

"substitution of esthetic strategies by physiological operations" in

music (p. 303).

Manuela Günter discusses literary representations of the Holocaust

and argues that our knowledge of the Holocaust exists only in

representations, which are indispensable in the context of the

mandate to remember. However, she also argues for establishing a

mechanism for evaluating the artistic quality of those representations

and considers the injunction against images a "regulative principle of

[this] discourse" (p. 307). Bettina Bannasch makes the case that

language cannot emulate the experience of the Holocaust and that

this unrepresentability of experience may not be used as a springboard

for an over-aestheticizing language (p. 342).

Michael Tilly examines the injunction against images within the

historically and theological contingent context of synagogue

architecture. He argues that the rejection of anthropomorphic

representations of God does not extend to a larger prohibition of all

figurative representation. Almuth Hammer posits that the trope of the

Holocaust's incommensurability can result in its sacralization--a status

that in her view reinscribes the empty space left by modernism's

abandonment of the transcendental. Finally, Carsten Probst reviews

recent artistic and architectural approaches to the Holocaust and

argues that in the face of the passage of time since the Holocaust

monuments have to inscribe in their design the process of

memory/remembering itself.

The volume's greatest strength is also the source of its methodological

weakness: the editors allow the contributions to employ individual

definitions of the injunction against graven images. The final product

thus reflects a multiplicity of disciplinary perspectives and

approaches, which allows the emergence of many (at points contradictory)

facets of the term at hand. The absence of a more sustained

synthesizing effort by the editors leaves me somewhat frustrated.

Rather than playing on the ostensible tension between the biblical

injunction and the plethora of Holocaust representations we experience

daily, it would have been more fruitful to work towards a taxonomy of

the latter. In other words, in the presence of many divergent representations

of the Holocaust--injunction or not--it is

crucial to advance our understanding

about sound epistemological and ontological principles that allow us to

distinguish between responsible and irresponsible representations.

Notes

[1]. Saul Friedländer, _Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism

and the "Final Solution"_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992),

p. 3. Original emphasis.

[2]. Manfred Köppen and Klaus R. Scherpe, "Zur Einführung: Der Streit um

die Darstellbarkeit des Holocaust," in _Bilder des Holocaust:

Literatur--Film--Bildende Kunst_, ed. Manfred Köppen and Klaus R.

Scherpe (Cologne: Böhlau, 1997), pp. 1-12.

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