Dr. Sarah Crane reflects on what she learned from Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer, and how he helped shape her approach to teaching the Holocaust.
At the beginning of this year, I was notified of the passing of renowned Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer. With his passing my thoughts immediately went to the first time that we met, when I was twenty-five and in my first year of graduate school. Famous for his deep knowledge of Holocaust testimonies and coining the term “choiceless choices,” I remember being immediately starstruck, and promptly mispronouncing his name. He was giving a lecture on how to teach with Holocaust testimonies, and his words emphasized that educators should favor the disjointed and alarming testimony of survivors such as Charlotte Delbo over the accessible narrative of The Diary of Anne Frank. It is through our inability to understand the horrors that are conveyed by survivors such as Delbo, Langer explained, that we encounter the truest reality of the Holocaust: horrible, visceral, and irredeemable.
Eager to redeem my blunder with his name, I went up to Langer after he finished and reintroduced myself. Upon hearing that my research focused on the Frankfurt-Auschwitz Trial (1963-65), he sent me a book chapter that was set to be released the following year, “The Afterdeath of the Holocaust.” In this chapter Langer recounts his experience as a guest at the Auschwitz Trial, highlighting the denial expressed by the former Auschwitz personnel in the dock. This denial, he explains, was a deflection away from the very real contributions that these men made to the “killing reality” of the Holocaust. This deflection is both a conscious and unconscious response utilized by all those who experienced the Holocaust first-hand. The Holocaust’s reality is so horrifying, that even survivors who wish to share their story find themselves fighting between two selves: one is the self who was present during these events and experienced its horrors first-hand, and the other is the person who came into being after the war, and can recount these experiences calmly and detached from this once visceral reality.
As those who study the Holocaust and wish to promote its legacy, Langer argues that our challenge is to identify with the emotions expressed by the first self, emotions which convey the Holocaust’s events in their totality. The testimonies of the self who directly experienced the conditions of the camps, transports, and ghettos, is frequently perceived by the listener as inaccessible, disjointed, and alarming. It can be tempting to look for stories of heroism or redemption when confronted with such dark material. However, it is in this darkness that we encounter the most direct source on the violent, disorienting, and inescapable reality experienced by eyewitnesses to Nazi persecution.
I remember finishing this chapter and immediately writing to Langer. I explained that though I wanted my students to understand the realities of the Holocaust, I was also afraid that focusing only on these horrors might result in my students feeling fatigue and disorientation. His response explained that it is human nature to desire some degree of deflection from such sources, but that acknowledging the limits of my ability to engage was part of the point. My job is not to find a way of making the Holocaust’s horrors more accessible to my students, but to respect the ways in which such horrors reach beyond our ability to understand and explain. He emphasized that there will be aspects of the Holocaust that will always seem beyond our reach. When confronted with these limits, however, our job remains to recognize and embrace the disorientation they demand. There is truth in this discomfort, a truth that will be lost if we are tempted to recognize only the stories of rescue or redemption.
Almost ten years after my meeting with Langer, I am still working through what it means to engage with this disorientation that comes from the sources of the Holocaust. As the field of Holocaust Studies continues to evolve, we are still confronted with the boundaries of our ability to perceive and represent its reality. It is my hope that by continuing to acknowledge these limits, and discussing them with our students, that Langer’s legacy will endure as we encourage each other to embrace this discomfort, as he did with me.
Lawrence Langer’s “The Afterdeath of the Holocaust” can be found in Witnessing Unbound, edited by Henri Thaler Lustiger and Habbo Knoch, published by Wayne State University Press in 2017.
Dr. Sarah Crane is a visiting professor of Holocaust & Genocide Studies at the University of Cincinnati and the Holocuast & Humanity Cener’s Scholar-in-Residence.
