Representing Auschwitz At the Margins of Testimony

The Holocaust is often described as beyond representation. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, this ground-breaking collection of essays by leading international scholars takes the Scrolls of Auschwitz as its starting point. These powerful hand-written testimonies, which were buried in the grounds of the crematoria at Birkenau in 1944, seek to bear witness to mass murder from at its core. The accounts, which are often marginalized in studies of Holocaust testimony, are frequently highly literary and ask significant questions of the notion that Auschwitz cannot be attested to. The volume also includes a number of essays that consider other forms of testimony, in media such as film, literature and video, which have also been marginalized as they fail to conform to dominant ideas about the nature and structure of the event.

Nicholas Chare is Lecturer in Gender Studies at the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Australia. His publications include the books Auschwitz and Afterimages and After Francis Bacon.

Dominic Williams is Montague Burton Fellow at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, UK. He is co-editor of Modernist Group Dynamics: The Politics and Poetics of Friendship.

Preface; Eva Hoffman
Introduction; Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams
1. The Harmony of Barbarism: Locating the 'Scrolls of Auschwitz' in Holocaust Historiography; Dan Stone
2. On the Problem of Empathy: Attending to Gaps in the Scrolls of Auschwitz; Nicholas Chare
3. 'The dead are my teachers': The Scrolls of Auschwitz in Jerome Rothenberg's Khurbn; Dominic Williams
4. Chain of Testimony: The Holocaust Researcher as Surrogate Witness; Anne Karpf
5. What Remains – Genocide and Things; Ulrike Kistner
6. Representing the Einsatzgruppen: The outtakes of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah; Sue Vice
7. Reconciling History in Alain Resnais's L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961); Hannah Mowat with Emma Wilson
8. Gender and Sexuality in Women Survivors' Personal Narratives; Cathy S. Gelbin
9. Art as Transport Station of Trauma? Haunting Objects in the works of Bracha Ettinger, Sarah Kofman, and Chantal Akerman; Griselda Pollock
Coda: Reading Witness Discourse; Hayden White