Customer Reviews

Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory

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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.

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.

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.

this book really moved me in how no other book has. i now have an appreciation to those who suffered in the holocaust and to hope and prevent something like the holocaust to occur again

The material is first-rate but his writing style is horrid. His five-part typology of memory doesn't make sense since he is basically repeating the same theme for each type of memory in each chapter. The underlying theme is about the destruction and shattering of the self. Very poorly written and bad organizatino of his material. There are much better and clearer books on the Holocaust! Don't bother with this one!