Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz

by Nicholas Chare, Dominic Williams

Overview

In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando—the “special squads,” composed almost exclusively of Jewish prisoners, who ensured the smooth operation of the gas chambers and had firsthand knowledge of the extermination process—buried on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau a series of remarkable eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide. This careful and penetrating study examines anew these “Scrolls of Auschwitz,” which were gradually recovered, in damaged and fragmentary form, in the years following the camp’s liberation. It painstakingly reconstructs their historical context and textual content, revealing complex literary works that resist narrow moral judgment and engage difficult questions about the limits of testimony.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781782389996
Publisher:	Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Publication date:	12/01/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Nicholas Chare is Associate Professor of Art History at the Université de Montréal. He is the author of Auschwitz and Afterimages: Abjection, Witnessing and Representation and After Francis Bacon: Synaesthesia and Sex in Paint, and the co-editor, with Dominic Williams, of Representing Auschwitz: At the Margins of Testimony.

Dominic Williams is a Montague Burton Fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of Leeds. He has published articles on modernism, the First World War, contemporary poetry and the Holocaust. In addition to co-editing Representing Auschwitz, he has co-edited, with Fabio A. Durão, Modernist Group Dynamics: The Politics and Poetics of Friendship.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface

Introduction: Matters of Testimony

Chapter 1. Matters of History
Chapter 2. Zalman Gradowski: Literature in the Death Factory
Chapter 3. Scattered Selves: The Stories of Leyb Langfus
Chapter 4. Final Arrangements: Zalman Lewental’s Histories of Resistance
Chapter 5. Characters and Letters: Chaim Herman and Marcel Nadjary
Chapter 6. The Camera Eye: Four Photographs from Birkenau

Conclusion: Crossing the Circle of Flame

Appendix

Index
 

Editorial Reviews

Check out Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams's piece on Slate's The Vault and also Searching for Feelings: The Scrolls of Auschwitz and Son of Saul on the Berghahn Blog. "In Matters of Testimony, Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams use the tools of literary criticism to analyse these formidable texts and offer new reflections on the scrolls. What sets the book apart is the way in which the authors consider how to read the Auschwitz scrolls, assessing their value as testimony... In that sense-and this is not the least significant element of this important book-they endeavour to reintegrate the Auschwitz scrolls into the general scholarship of Holocaust writing. This is incredibly interesting in the sense that the authors of the scrolls themselves asked the seminal questions that now structure this subfield of Holocaust studies... Matters of Testimony is an important work of scholarship." - Jewish Quarterly "Matters of Testimony is bold and fascinating, and provides a fresh and insightful analysis that contributes to scholarship about the Sonderkommando (SK), Holocaust testimony, Holocaust writing, the material culture of Auschwitz, resistance, and the Auschwitz camp complex itself." - Shofar "This is a profoundly moving book. It is more than just the most complete analysis of the Sonderkommando writings in the English language, it is a study that challenges readers to ask fundamental questions about how we access the past. In doing so, Matters of Testimony is a manifesto for the importance of historical and literary analysis even when scholars are confronted with this most difficult and traumatic material." - Tom Lawson, Northumbria University "This is a major book that changes the field. It is a brilliant and original work of superb historical research and profoundly affecting cultural analysis." - Griselda Pollock, University of Leeds "The authors' analyses are meticulous and fascinating, and are invariably based on equally impressive research. It is unusual to be able to say that an academic monograph on Holocaust literature serves as not just an analysis of but also a memorial for its subject, but that is the case here." - Sue Vice, University of Sheffield

From the Publisher