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Witnessing the Disaster
Witnessing the Disaster
Essays on Representation and
the Holocaust

Edited by
Michael Bernard-Donals
and
Richard Glejzer

the university of wisconsin press

 The University of Wisconsin Press
1930 Monroe Street
Madison, Wisconsin 53711

www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/

3 Henrietta Street
London WC2E 8LU, England

Copyright © 2003
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved

1 3 5 4 2

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Witnessing the disaster : essays on representation and the Holocaust
[edited by] Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer.
p. cm.
ISBN 0–299–18360–2 (cloth)
ISBN 0–299–18364–5 (paper)
1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in literature—Study and teaching.
I. Bernard-Donals, Michael F. II. Glejzer, Richard R.
PN56.H55 W58 2003
809´.93358—dc21 2002010203

Publication of this book has been made possible in part by the generous support
of the Anonymous Fund of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
 Contents

Introduction: Representations of the Holocaust and

the End of Memory 3
Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer

I The Epistemology of Witness

1 The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s
Maus and the Afterimages of History 23
James E. Young
2 “The Language of Dollars”: Multilingualism and
the Claims of English in Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust 46
Alan Rosen
3 A Pedagogy of Trauma (or a Crisis of Cynicism):
Teaching, Writing, and the Holocaust 75
Janet Alsup
4 The “Erotics of Auschwitz”: Coming of Age in
The Painted Bird and Sophie’s Choice 90
Sharon Oster
5 Maus and the Epistemology of Witness 125
Richard Glejzer

II Memory, Authenticity, and the “Jewish Question”

6 Promiscuous Reading: The Problem of Identification
and Anne Frank’s Diary 141
Susan David Bernstein

v
vi co nt ent s

7 Humboldt’s Gift and Jewish American Self-Fashioning

“After Auschwitz” 162
Elizabeth Jane Bellamy
8 Mormon Literature and the Irreducible Other:
Writing the Unspeakable in Holocaust Literature 183
Reinhold Hill
9 Beyond the Question of Authenticity: Witness and
Testimony in the Fragments Controversy 196
Michael Bernard-Donals

III The Ethical Imperative

10 Maurice Blanchot: Fighting Spirit 221
Geoffrey Hartman
11 Shoah and the Origins of Teaching 231
David Metzger
12 Teaching (after) Auschwitz: Pedagogy between
Redemption and Sublimity 245
Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer
13 Approaching Limit Events: Siting Agamben 262
Dominick LaCapra

Contributors 307
Index 309
Witnessing the Disaster
 Introduction
Representations of the Holocaust and
the End of Memory
michael bernard-donals and richard glejzer

In spite of Adorno’s dictum of over forty years ago that to make art from
the suffering of the Holocaust is barbarity, the event of the Holocaust
can be and has been effectively represented. Even if Lawrence Langer
had not pointed this fact out in 1976, the proliferation of novels, plays,
films, and other representations of the event seems to have mooted
Adorno’s point altogether, though the fact of that proliferation also
raises serious questions about the culture industry’s prurience. But we
wonder whether a more complicated and troubling facet of Adorno’s
point has been missed altogether: while it is true that representations of
the event, and scholarly work on those representations, have experi-
enced something of a boom in the last decade, it is unclear to what ex-
tent those representations—and the academic industry that has grown
up around them—provide a knowledge of the Shoah, and to what ex-
tent they provide (or perhaps better, present) something other than
knowledge, something akin to a flash of horror that precedes and dis-
turbs our ability to know, the barbarism that Adorno concludes must be
the ultimate poetic object after Auschwitz. So he may have been right
after all: the demand to know and to remember the events may well

3
4 ber na rd-do nal s & g l ej z er

simply replicate the rationality of the Final Solution, if that demand

translates to the will to knowledge, whereby each representation is ulti-
mately reduced to a moral imperative or to the need to square memo-
ries of the survivors—what they saw—with history.
Dori Laub makes just this point about witness testimony in the face
of the historian’s demand for authenticity. He gives us the testimony of
a woman bearing witness to the short-lived uprising in Auschwitz in
which she remembers seeing four crematoria exploding in flames, and
the subsequent reaction by historians after viewing her testimony. That
reaction was dismissive: what she says is completely flawed, since we
know that only one of the crematoria was destroyed, not four; “Since
the memory of the testifying woman turned out to be, in this way, fal-
lible, one could not accept—nor give credence to—her whole account
of the events. It was utterly important to remain accurate, lest the revi-
sionist in history discredit everything.”1 Further, Laub reports one par-
ticular reaction: “‘Don’t you see,’ one historian passionately exclaimed,
‘that the woman’s eyewitness account of the uprising that took place at
Auschwitz is hopelessly misleading in its incompleteness? She had no
idea what was going on. She ascribes importance to an attempt that, his-
torically, made no difference.’”2 But Laub sees something in this
woman’s testimony that the historians do not, something that the focus
of squaring what she reports with a historical record ultimately occludes.
For Laub, what was important was not the number of chimneys that ex-
ploded but rather the way in which the witness enacted the memory, the
way her testimony resists the silence that Auschwitz itself attempted to
enact: “The woman’s testimony, on the other hand, is breaking the
frame of the concentration camp by and through her very testimony:
she is breaking out of Auschwitz even by her very talking. She had
come, indeed, to testify, not to the empirical number of the chimneys,
but to resistance, to the affirmation of survival, to the breakage of the
frame of death.”3 Laub concludes that there is a more important—and
indeed more authentic—knowledge at work in this particular testi-
mony, a knowledge that is passed over in the attempt at historical au-
thenticity. It is this woman’s experience of resistance and survival that is
the ultimate object of her bearing witness. The survivor’s testimony and
the reactions to it show what happens when one joins questions of rep-
resentation to questions of history, questions of accuracy to questions of
authenticity. And yet while the testimony is at the very least problemat-
ically connected to the event it purports to narrate, it is transmitted
Introduction 5

(horror; fascination; an act of witnessing) just as in other contemporary

representations of the Holocaust. The question that must be asked is just
what is being presented, whether what the writer witnesses and writes
and what the reader sees in testimony amount to the same thing.
It is not only the question of authenticity that is at issue in Holocaust
testimonies; so is the problem of memory. During a conference at the
Yad Vashem International School for Holocaust Studies two years ago,
at a session on history led by Michael Marrus, a survivor stood up to
take issue with something Marrus had said about transports to one of
the camps. A large man whose voice boomed a strongly accented En-
glish said, “No, that was not how it was. From Warsaw to Treblinka my
family was taken in trains with compartments, not boxcars,” and he
cited the month and year during which his family was destroyed. Mar-
rus responded, “Yes, they were green cars with seats facing each other
down the aisle, and that ran for three weeks in May.” Marrus went on to
mention the names of the towns at which the train stopped on the way
to the camp, and as he did so, the survivor, who had by this time sat
down, nodded his head in amazement, remembering—or was he really
recalling a story?—the time and the place, and the train on which his
family went to its end.
It is likely that in twenty years, this survivor, along with his wife,
whom he met in the Russian Army, all of the other survivors who met
in that room in a building on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and the woman
who testified to the Auschwitz revolt, will be dead. And along with them
will go the memories, the palpable remainders of events whose imprint
is indelibly written as history. This story is worth retelling because we
wonder about statements that equate the death of survivors with the
end of memory and of history, for we see in this story another possibil-
ity. Marrus, a historian who was not in Warsaw and did not travel in
the train about which he knew so much, was able to “remember” the
details of an event that seemed lost even to the individual who experi-
enced it. But living memory is not history; witnessing the event, and
having been in the train, does not guarantee that its representations will
not be inaccurate, or ineffective, or simply wrong. In fact, living mem-
ory is not so much the recuperation of events as it is an imprint of the
loss of the event, and narrative histories, built as a bulwark against
memory’s loss, stand in for and replace the event. Two conclusions re-
sult from this claim. The first is that the end of memory does not mean
the end of history, but instead marks history’s beginning. The second,
Introduction 7

all—is not knowledge, nor is the inconsistency between Marrus’s narra-

tive and the survivor’s memory evidence of an error or bad faith. In
Caruth’s terms, the interjection—the testimony—preserves the event in
its disruptive effect; but the gap between the historical record and the ir-
retrievable event cannot be filled by memory or testimony.
We do not remember a traumatic event so much as we “take leave
of it,” in Caruth’s terms, though it leaves an indelible mark on every-
thing we say, including the subject of the narrative of the event. It is at
the point of “losing what we have to say” that we speak,6 and writing
begins. The distance between what has been witnessed and what can be
committed to testimony—what was seen and what can be said—is often
wide and always palpable: not only in the witness’s statements but in the
shrugged shoulders, the winces, the tears, and the silences that punctu-
ate written and oral testimonies. The survivor’s insistence, at Yad Va-
shem, that his family had seats in a compartment and did not stand in
boxcars was an insistence upon the facts of history. But the urgency in
the interjection—and Marrus’s equally insistent focus on the timetable
of the Reichsbahn—registers an element of history that is unavailable
to knowledge. We may understand, through the testimonies of these
two very different men, the nature of the transport during some weeks
in May 1943 in Poland, and we may enumerate at least a few of its vic-
tims from this memory, but what is perhaps most chilling about this ex-
change (and the one described by Laub) is not the content of the story—
of the experience—itself but of what cannot be placed into the
narrative: the witness’s sense of horror, or resignation, or loss at the
sight of the green passenger cars, or his anger over the historian’s error.
They find no place in the language of narrative, though they register in
the interjection. Here, in the no-place of the narrative, is the disaster of
experience seen by the survivor but available only as the incommensur-
able narratives: one the product of footnotes, as Raul Hilberg has called
his and other historians’ work, and one the product of the loss of the
event. What was witnessed by a roomful of people in Jerusalem, or
those who view any number of testimonies from the Fortunoff video ar-
chive, is not living memory—a window onto the events of the Shoah—
but its end.

The essays in this book examine the ways in which writing and repre-
sentation of the Shoah—in survivor testimonies, fiction, film, museums,
and memorials, among other forms—involve problems of witnessing.
8 b er na rd-do nal s & g l ej z er

Since the Holocaust is represented in spite of Adorno’s dictum, what is

the relation in such representations between what one sees and what
cannot be seen or remembered? Clearly the survivor at Yad Vashem
and the one described by Laub were there on the spot: they saw what
they saw, and whether we understand memory as a receptacle or a void,
some aspect of what they saw has made itself apparent to them. The
question that remains, however, concerns the extent to which what they
saw can be made visible to other, secondhand witnesses, and by what
means it can be made visible. The problem, of course, is that Marrus’s
representation of what the witness saw is more accurate than the
witness’s, but it may not make Marrus’s representation more effective.
To cite another, more controversial example that is treated in some de-
tail later, Stefan Maechler’s representation of what Binjamin Wilkomir-
ski (as Bruno Doesseker, the clarinet maker born in Switzerland rather
than the Jewish survivor born in Riga) saw is more accurate as a testa-
ment to the events that occurred in the years from the subtitle of Frag-
ments (1939–1948) than the author’s. But Maechler’s representation is no
more effective as an indication of what Doesseker/Wilkomirski saw
than the “fiction” of the memoir. The distance between what is said and
what cannot be said may be small, as in the former cases, or vast, as in
the latter, but in all three cases you have representations that “write”
the Holocaust that present what exceeds writing and representation—
some kernel of the event as it makes itself present to the witness that
cannot be transmitted because it is not knowledge. And all three cases
involve problems including, but not limited to, investigations of mem-
ory, the problematization of history, and a complication of the notion of
mimesis.
Over the last ten years, dozens of books addressing the subject of
representation of the Holocaust have been published. Many of these
studies begin with the problem laid out in Lawrence Langer’s seminal
study, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, and his subsequent books
on memoir and poetry (Versions of Survival) and on survivor testimonies
(Holocaust Testimonies). While Langer’s studies deal specifically with the
formal properties of Holocaust representation, and while they carefully
trace the characteristics visible in fiction, in poetry, and in the recollec-
tions of survivors, only the book on testimonies considers the problem of
witnessing itself. Even there, witnessing and testimony are often con-
flated, and despite the “conflict among selves” that Langer uses as a
metaphor to explain the gaps and impasses in survivor testimonies that
Introduction 9

he found in the Fortunoff archive at Yale, it remains only a metaphor.

James Young’s Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust studies the narrative
structure of memory but not the narrative structure of the works that
are written about the event; his later work on Holocaust memorials goes
farther to examine what he calls the anti-redemptory context for a gen-
eration whose memory is at a remove from the events and must create
their own.7 Both Langer’s and Young’s books ask questions about the
nature of the language and modes of representation that are used, often
problematically, to create what amounts to a collective memory that is
often at odds with the individual memories impressed upon the survi-
vors. Both conclude where we begin in this book by suggesting that the
Holocaust, as a catalyst for literary representation, may provide a
glimpse of the structure of knowledge. This same impulse drives Daniel
Schwarz’s Imagining the Holocaust, which analyzes a number of more or
less literary representations of the Shoah and draws conclusions about
how they may provide ways to imagine, if not know, the event by means
of their generic constraints; and it underwrites Sue Vice’s project in
Holocaust Fiction, in which she examines the controversies surrounding
the publication of books like Kosinski’s The Painted Bird and Keneally’s
Schindler’s List and the cultural context in which such controversies could
take place. But rather than see fiction, memoir, film, and other repre-
sentations as interventions in the production of knowledge of the Shoah,
the contributors to this book take the glimpse of the structure of knowl-
edge as a point of departure and examine how our confrontation with
representations of the Shoah also provides a way to investigate what
comes before language (trauma; history; witness) and what comes after
it (testimony; pedagogy). In other words, this book is less about what lit-
erary representations do than about how they function as a testimony of
what can and cannot be seen, and as a result of what can and cannot be
known.
Of course, several scholars in recent years have made the same point
that, because the Holocaust—as an event—is traumatic, and because
writing about it is affected by that trauma, we need a new understand-
ing of knowledge and discourse. Geoffrey Hartman has gone some way
toward establishing such a theory in a series of essays in a number of dif-
ferent books and journals. Dominick LaCapra’s essays, collected in Rep-
resenting the Holocaust and History and Memory after Auschwitz, theorize the
way Holocaust representations exceed or work beyond meaning,
though in terms of the psychosocial Freudian unconscious rather than
10 ber na rd-do nal s & g l ej z er

the sublime. We would agree with Hartman’s thesis about the need to
theorize the sublime and connect it to representations of the Holocaust
(a task he continues to pursue in his essay on Blanchot included here).
We also include in this collection analyses of representations themselves
(through testimony and mimetic means), though they are seen by the
authors as complicating notions of representation, the sublime, and the
Holocaust as an event that can be remembered or represented. Most of
the essays in the book fall between studies that see themselves as primar-
ily descriptive and those that see themselves as theoretical, examining
the ways in which individual representations put a good deal of pressure
on what we think we know about events and about the dynamics of see-
ing and knowing that lie at their foundation.
It will come as no surprise to readers of this book that many of the
most significant studies on the Holocaust over the last several years
have been done in the field of history (see Friedlander’s Probing the Lim-
its of Representation; Lang’s Writing and the Holocaust and Act and Idea in the
Nazi Genocide; Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life; and Cole’s Selling
the Holocaust ). Countless journal articles on the subject of history and
historiography have taken on the problem of the status of (testimonial)
evidence in studies of the Holocaust. Most historians suggest either that
the evidence (including written records and objects from the ghettos
and camps) speaks for itself, giving it a status beyond question, or that
it is mediated by the historian’s or curator’s ideologies and choices.
Our concern here is less about how evidence should or should not
count in our assessment of events, or how the evidence can be read as
a text; rather, we are interested in the possibility that, though it is me-
diated, evidence provides traces of the event that leave a mark on the
viewer or reader.
In short, we want to get past the notion that the Holocaust is an
“event” that defies representation and yet which is represented success-
fully. Instead we move on to consider specific, contemporary instances
of witnessing the Holocaust; how those instances are made apparent in
testimonies and other writing; how those testimonies are structured aes-
thetically, historically, and culturally; and how they are cut across by
contemporary debates about authenticity, what counts as documentary
evidence, and the limits of art and of knowledge. To do so, we take up
two separate but related conceptual issues that are involved in under-
standing Holocaust representation in terms of witnessing: memory and
ethics. Three questions concerning memory are generally associated
Introduction 11

with the Holocaust. The first, the idea of Jewish memory and the ques-
tion of how to contextualize the Shoah, profoundly affects the histori-
cal narrative of Judaism, Jewish culture, and—specifically—a defini-
tion of “the Jew” in contemporary literature. The second, the question
of National Socialist cultural memory, particularly as it relates to Jews
and the “Jewish question,” tends to focus on how a German cultural
and historical memory was created through which to marginalize Juda-
ism and which led eventually to the Final Solution. But posing these
questions together presents a final difficulty: in what ways does the de-
sire to create a post-Holocaust ( Jewish) cultural memory tend also to
marginalize the particularities of the individual Jewish lives, to inte-
grate them (in Adorno’s words) in the disaster of the Holocaust? The
essays included here will try to answer that question and suggest ways
in which literary representations of Jews, Judaism, and the events com-
prising the Holocaust trouble the notion of memory. Our working hy-
pothesis is that the creation of a subaltern Jewish subject in literary rep-
resentations of the Holocaust alters both Jewish history/memory as
well as the cultural memory that led to the ovens. If memory’s effect
upon historical and literary narratives is transformative as well as po-
tentially dangerous—in that it led to the disaster of the Holocaust—
then it is possible that the creation of a Jewish memory of the events
of the Shoah also integrates the particularities of those events into an
imaginary—and manageable—narrative.
What this suggests, then, is that the insistence upon “authentic”
memories—testimonies from survivors that accord with the historical
record; representations that hew to the horrible logic of the Final
Solution—may replicate the logic that promulgated the Shoah by elim-
inating that which defies logic or system. The debates surrounding The
Painted Bird and Fragments are debates over the authenticity of these “tes-
timonies”: did the witness really see what he claims to have seen? The
problem with posing the question this way is that it ignores the extent to
which the representations indicate a site of trauma that may or may not
be available in the historical record at all. While the narratives may
prove to be historically inauthentic, in dismissing them from the “Holo-
caust archive” we lose what capacity they have for causing the reader—
the secondhand witness—to see that traumatic kernel (whether or not it
squares with the event we believe we know as “the Holocaust”). Put an-
other way, if memory is a way to integrate lived events into a historical
series of (remembered) events—whether in National Socialist ideology
6 b er na rd-do nal s & g l ej z er

which follows from the first, is that written histories need to be aware
of—and indicate—their status as substitutes for, and supplements to, a
deep loss. Historians like Marrus may remember more clearly than
those who were there; but their memories mark, and should indicate, the
loss of the event to its witnesses, and its effect on subsequent witnesses.
We consider history as that which can be preserved as a memory
and written. But the event that serves as the object of history—in the
case of the survivor at Yad Vashem, the journey by train that led to the
destruction of his family; in the case of the survivor of the uprising at
Auschwitz, her resistance to the fact of annihilation—cannot be made
unavailable. This is true as much for the historian as it is for the one
who was there. Maurice Blanchot writes, in The Writing of the Disaster,
about the “immemorial” nature of the disaster and suggests that once
an experience occurs, it is forever lost; it is at this point—“upon losing
what we have to say,”4 the point of forgetfulness—that writing begins.
The loss of the event is the source of memory, writing, and history.
This is especially true in the case of horrible events such as those
recollected by Marrus and the survivor in attendance at his lecture or
by the witness to the destruction at Auschwitz. The witness saw the
deed or the circumstance that presented itself (as trauma). But the
event, as witnessed, gets in the way of what can be known or said about
it. In Cathy Caruth’s terms, the event registers on the witness as a void;
to survive—to “get away apparently unharmed,” in Freud’s terms—the
witness testifies, though the narrative of the event bears at best an
oblique relation to what the witness saw. You could argue that there is
no history—a knowledge of what happened—available to either the
survivor or the historian. Between the horrible memory of loss whose
image the survivor cannot seem to shake and the stunningly complete
knowledge of the timetable on which this particular train ran that is
available to the historian is something unavailable to knowledge, lost
“to what we were to say.”5
Caruth’s point is that testimonial narratives do not disclose history;
instead, they disclose—where the narrative most clearly shows its
seams—the effect of events upon witnesses. The survivor’s correction of
the historian functions as an interjection more than an argument, and it
likely interrupts the survivor’s knowledge of history and the memory of
his place in it as much as it intervenes in Marrus’s narrative. The effect
of what the witness saw—in the presence of an audience of scholars and
survivors, and those who have no historical connection to the event at
12 ber na rd-do nal s & g l ej z er

or in the continuum of the history of the Jewish people—then that inte-

gration potentially evacuates the particularity of the events and renders
them marginal (or altogether absent) in any literary (or other) represen-
tation. Adorno was right: “genocide is the absolute integration” in both
material and literary terms. We investigate how and whether contem-
porary literary representations of the Shoah manage to work against in-
tegration by carving out what amounts to a subaltern Jewish subject.
And we will examine how some contemporary literary representations
of the Shoah disintegrate cultural memory—in some cases in their en-
actment of trauma, in some cases by brushing historical representation,
in Walter Benjamin’s terms, against the grain—and call into question
the notions of both a Jewish cultural memory and a coherent National
Socialist (or, later and more broadly, anti-Semitic) sense of “the Jew.”
We move from the question of memory to the question of ethics by
taking up the two imperatives generally connected to Holocaust writing
and representation: first, to produce knowledge of the event so that
something like it not recur; second, to produce in the reader an effect
that forces him or her not simply to recognize the event but to confront
it. The first imperative is founded on the assumption that mimesis is not
only possible but that there is a direct correspondence between aes-
thetic object and the object of representation. The second imperative is
founded on the assumption that the knowledge produced in the relation
with a work translates into universal ethical action. The essays in this
book critically examine these and other ethical imperatives attached to
the Shoah by suggesting that the effects of representations of the Holo-
caust are what could be called excessive, in that they exceed our ability
to bring them into accord with knowledge, and that efforts to work
through the effects of witnessing the Holocaust—or of bearing witness
to others’ testimonies—cannot be mapped as simply as some (like Sho-
shana Felman and Dominick LaCapra, to mention only two) have sug-
gested. If witnesses to the Shoah present a kernel of the event in testi-
mony but fail to represent the event in a language adequate to history,
then establishing the effects of those testimonies upon subsequent wit-
nesses is a complicated affair. Any attempt to produce knowledge from
that testimony—to obey the ethical imperative by writing a version of
what the witness has seen—risks emptying it of the horror of the event.
It may be possible to produce knowledge from the Holocaust, but this is
not to say that we produce knowledge of the Holocaust. The question
worth asking—and the essays in this book ask it—is whether it is better
Introduction 13

to engage in an ethics of trauma, in which what is transmitted is some-

thing other than knowledge, a radical sense of the event’s horror and
unreason rather than a reasonable map of the event as history. One of
the most significant shortcomings in much of the contemporary scholar-
ship on Holocaust representation is that in its concern for the adequacy
of representation to the event it ignores the effects of those representa-
tions in specifically ethical (that is, particular) terms. These essays will
begin to redress this shortcoming.

The book falls into three sections, each of which includes four or five es-
says. The sections roughly follow the argument laid out above to ex-
plore the issues of witness and testimony, the complexities of memory,
and the problem of ethics. Each section includes essays that examine the
pedagogical implications of these issues, with particular attention de-
voted to what, if anything, we hope to teach when presenting students
with histories and representations of the Shoah. The hypothesis that be-
gins the first section, “The Epistemology of Witness,” is that the recent
debates over representations of the Shoah like Schindler’s List are telling
because they inevitably fall back on an unnecessarily simplistic view of
mimesis (that is, the truth can be told). This is borne out by comments
written by visitors to the U.S. Holocaust Museum: “I didn’t know what
happened until I came here.” By examining recent representations of
the Holocaust as representations of witness rather than of the event it-
self, we can trace the distance between seeing and knowing both in
intellectuals’ uneasiness over what we should see in representations of
the Holocaust and in the peculiar forms of those representations them-
selves. James E. Young’s essay “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art
Spiegelman’s Maus and the Afterimages of History” examines how
Spiegelman acts as a witness by providing his experiences through ex-
pression and textual actuality, while in order to make his testimony
seem true he “objectivizes” it by effacing himself as witness. This double
act, of effacing the self and foregrounding the self in the telling of the
tale, goes past the debates about how Spiegelman did or did not get his-
tory right and instead examines the nature and structure of history and
of its witnesses. The difficulty, of course, is that this double act also sug-
gests a space between them: how are the “histories” of Artie on the one
hand and Vladek on the other related, and what chasm separates these
two survivors? One of Young’s points is that the historical trauma that
seems to tie the two witnesses together is incidents and moments that
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