Comment ce fut et comment cela aura été : Continuer à écrire histoire et littérature après la Shoah

Résumé 0

In Wie es war und wie es gewesen sein wird (How it was and how it will have been), Doron Rabinovici discusses the ability of history and literature to come to terms with the past and write about the Holocaust. He studies the question of whether the unexplainable can be explained and the unconceivable understood. Academic approaches provide us with facts but they do not search for a new language to adequately represent the extermination of the European Jews. Additionally, science is not able to reveal individual victims’ suffering. However, literature may distort the truth and simply perpetuate stereotypes. Rabinovici provides examples of how to overcome those dangers. Poetry offers new ways to express trauma. Literature is an ongoing process. Literature on the Holocaust documents our efforts to give voice to our speechlessness in the face of mass murder. Literature after Auschwitz may in fact address our need to speak about the unspeakable.