Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory [Hardcover]

Lawrence L. Langer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1991 | ISBN-10: 0300049668 | ISBN-13: 978-0300049664 | Edition: First Edition

This book provides an analysis of the unique ways in which oral testimony of survivors contributes to our understanding of the Holocaust. It also sheds light on the forms and functions of memory as victims relive devastating experiences of pain, humiliation, and loss. Drawing on the Fortunoff video archives for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, the author shows how oral Holocaust testimonies complement historical studies by enabling us to confront the human dimensions of the catastrophe. Quoting from these interviews, Langer develops a technique for interpreting them as we might a written text. He contrasts written and oral narratives, noting that while survivor memoirs by authors such as Primo Levi and Charlotte Delbo transform reality through style, imagery, chronology, or a coherent moral vision, oral testimonies resist these organizing impulses and allow instead a kind of unshielded truth to emerge, just as powerful in its impact as the visions taking shape in written memoirs. He argues that it is necessary to deromanticize the survival experience and that to burden it with accolades about the "indomitable human spirit" is to slight its painful complexity and ambivalence. Finally he explores the task of establishing a meaningful connection between consequential living and inconsequential dying, between moral striving and the spirit of anguish and sense of a diminished self that pervades these Holocaust testimonies.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Disturbing and controversial, this work is based on 300 of the more than 1,400 taped interviews with Holocaust survivors preserved at Yale University's Fortunoff Video Archives. It's disturbing because of the survivors' graphic retelling of the starvation, torture, brutalization and cannibalism that occurred in the Nazi death camps. It's controversial because, instead of focusing on the bravery necessary to endure such horrors, Langer's book delves into the psychic wounds that 50 years after their infliction remain unhealed. "We have these double lives," said one survivor. "We can't cancel out. It just won't go away." Holocaust Memories won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for 1991. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Hundreds of videotaped oral testimonies by Holocaust survivors are preserved in the Fortunoff Video Archives at Yale University. These tapes comprise a spontaneous record of victims' unimaginable ordeals, their disorientation, subsequent readjustment and the psychic scars they still carry. Intermingling their narratives with a structural analysis that draws on the writings of Primo Levi, Maurice Blanchot, Viktor Frankl, Martin Gilbert and others, Langer ( The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination ) explores how survivors created an "impromptu self," following impulses in order to stay alive. He notes that for many, the Nazi assault on body and spirit resulted in a permanent sense of discontinuity with normal assumptions about good and evil, individual choice and responsibility. This brilliant, scholarly book stares into the void; it eschews tributes to heroism and martyrdom, focusing instead on the personal and societal wreckage caused by mass murder. Jewish Book Club selection.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 236 pages
• Publisher: Yale Univ Pr; First Edition edition (March 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300049668
• ISBN-13: 978-0300049664
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,704,958 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vitally important text for Holocaust studies, April 29, 2001

By 

Mrs. T (NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (Paperback)

Lawrence Langer's landmark study of the oral and videotaped testimonies of Holocaust survivors is essential reading for anyone interested in Holocaust and Genocide studies. I found the book most interesting-- and most troubling-- for the way Langer describes the narratives which the survivors use to describe experiences that are, literally, beyond any kind of known literary conventions. Langer suggests that the traumas of these events are so shattering that the survivors still are struggling for ways to evoke their experience, to bear witness in a way that other people can understand. At the same time, their narratives are part of a struggle to make these incomprehensible experiences bearable. The efforts of suriviors to articulate their experience is not only meant to provide a historical record of a terrible moment in history, but also to give the surivors themselves a way of framing their experiences so they can live with them.

What is most wrenching about these testimonies, is, perhaps, the sense that these experiences will never be fully evoked. The stories which the survivors tell are just that-- narrative structures designed to impose a certain comprehensibility to experiences which are beyond understanding.

There are any number of incredibly moving, visceral works on the Holocaust, but The Ruins of Memory stands alone as a unique, and terrible study of how, on an individual level, the Holocaust shatters the self. It is hard reading, but it is also essential reading.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars you can't loose the opportunity of reading this book, September 24, 2000

By 

Laura Dominguez (Ituzaingó, Buenos Aires Argentina) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (Paperback)

I have read many many books of the holocoust many of them have been very moving but this book is excelent , to be honest i couldn't stop reading it, if you are interesting in this kind of books this is the one that you should buy, even do is amazingly sad, is absolutely and 100 % realistic. When i finish it i felt so weird, I actually felt like a was there,in that time,with those people,with those families and finaly into their community. as a secret between you and me,I could't stop crying to. with the other books that I have read before I kind of have an idea of what was living in that time but this one made me completely understand their pain and sufferings, is realy cruel what those people did to their community. so to be short I highly recommend this tittle, and i hope you enjoy it as much as i did.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Should be included in any Holocaust library, January 24, 2002

By 

History Buff "owen11" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (Paperback)

Lawrence Langer is well known for his cataloguing and interpretations on the Holocaust, but it took quite a few pages of this book for me to really "get" what he was saying. (I believe the first negative reviewer never "got" it. It's a difficult abstract concept, I fully admit that.)

Given that knowledge, and warned that you must enter the book without a preconceived negative notion about a split type of self, this book becomes fascinating. The details are quite dramatic, and it becomes progressively easier to see the point of the self splitting in order to survive the realities that simply can't be absorbed by the human mind. Fascinating work, and a book you won't want to put down.