Language:
English
Year of publication:
2002
Titel der Quelle:
Representations
Angaben zur Quelle:
79 (2002) 1-27
Keywords:
Auschwitz (Concentration camp)
;
Nazi concentration camps
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Historiography
Abstract:
Primo Levi, in "The Drowned and the Saved, " relates that a soccer match was held between the SS and the Jewish "Sonderkommando" in the courtyard of the crematorium at Auschwitz, citing it as a striking example of a "gray zone" in the moral topography of the concentration camp. The soccer match captures a logic central to the ideology of the camp: the creation of an all-encompassing web of culpability that erases distinction between victim, executioner, and witness, thus displacing the burden of guilt from oppressor to oppressed. Turning to writings of Levi, Agamben, Camus, Cathy Caruth, and Shoshana Felman, suggests that the discursive scheme of a "gray zone" is radicalized and greatly extended in today's criticism. It not only has "secondary witnesses" (e.g. readers) involved in a web of culpability, but it has also been applied to today's political life, ethics, etc., thus placing this historically-bound phenomenon out of its context. Contends that representation of the Holocaust does not render the reader, viewer, etc., a traitor in Camus' sense; many Holocaust writers have shown that the other's past can be made proximate rather than intimate to the reader.
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