Preempting the Holocaust [Hardcover]

Professor Lawrence L. Langer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 11, 1998

Lawrence L. Langer, perhaps the most important literary critic of the Holocaust, here explores the use of Holocaust themes in literature, memoirs, film, and painting. Langer focuses his attention on a variety of controversial issues: the attempt of a number of commentators to appropriate the subject of the Holocaust for private moral agendas; the ordeal of women in the concentration camps; the conflicting claims of individual and community survival in the Kovno ghetto; the current tendency to conflate the Holocaust with other modern atrocities, thereby blurring the distinctive features of each; and the sporadic impulse to shift the emphasis from the crime, the criminals, and the victimized to the question of forgiveness and the need for healing. He concludes with some reflections on the challenge of teaching the Holocaust to generations of students who know less and less of its history but continue to manifest an eager curiosity about its human impact and psychological roots.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Lawrence Langer is the world's preeminent critic of holocaust literature. His Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, which won the National Books Critics Circle Award in Criticism, is considered by many to be the best, most unflinching account of Jewish oral histories of the holocaust.

Preempting the Holocaust is a collection of Langer's essays about literary and artistic treatments of holocaust experience, such as Art Spiegelman's Maus books and Cynthia Ozick's Rosa stories. Major themes in this collection include comparisons of women's and men's experiences of the Holocaust, and warnings against interpreting Nazi atrocities as the work of an coldly efficient bureaucracy (because, Langer argues, using metaphors of "killing machines" mitigates one's awareness of the killers' evil). As a whole, "The purpose of these essays is to contribute to the incessant anxious dialogue about how our civilization may absorb into its reasonable hopes for the future the disabling outburst of unreason we name the Holocaust, as it continues to assault memory and imagination with immeasurable sorrow and undiminished force." Langer's writing is spare, his thinking is forceful, and his refusal to draw simple lessons from his literary analyses is appropriately and productively disorienting. --Michael Joseph Gross

From Publishers Weekly

"Anyone teaching [the Holocaust] must be willing to confront behavior that cannot be explained by prior notions of why we do what we do." In this collection of essays, most of which were delivered at Holocaust conferences, Langer, author of the NBCC prize-winning Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, challenges our tendency to push aside the uniquely horrible reality of this event to make room for the uplifting, the rationalizing, the triumphal versions, whether or not they convey the truth. Describing the Nazis as mindless bureaucratic killing machines rather than sadistic murderers or insisting that the establishment of Israel in 1948 somehow makes up for the death of two-thirds of Europe's Jews are examples of our inability to deal honestly with a historical event that undermines all religious and humane assumptions about people's relations to one another and to God. Langer finds a disquieting truth in the work of Primo Levi, Samuel Bak, Cynthia Ozick and Art Spiegelman, but criticizes artist Judy Chicago's Holocaust Project and theologian Tzvetan Todorov's writing for seeking falsely to universalize the experience of the Holocaust, thereby distorting and reducing it. "There is simply no connection between our ordinary suffering and their unprecedented agony, nor do our trivial inclinations toward sin resemble in any way the minds that devised such terminal torture." Langer's own experience interviewing Holocaust survivors has profoundly branded him, and his deep sympathy and outrage on behalf of the innocent victims of humanity's most horrendous crime permeates these somber and alarming essays.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 228 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1St Edition edition (October 11, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300073577
• ISBN-13: 978-0300073577
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,691,970 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars scholar warns against romanticizing the Holocaust, October 10, 2000

By 

Bruce J. Wasser (Lake Bluff, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Preempting the Holocaust (Paperback)

Professor Lawrence Langer has collected a series of essays pertaining to interpreting the Holocaust and issued them in a slender volume of enormous importance. Preempting the Holocaust is a warning, an interpretation, and a "re-visioning" of that horrific event. Using his considerable skills in oral history, Professor Langer has little hopeful or comforting to say; in fact, he constantly admonishes us against interpreting the Holocaust through modern Christian values. Thus, he argues that there is nothing redemptive about the suffering of the victims of the Holocaust, that superficial analyses of many survivors' accounts could have future students blaming the victim instead of the perpetrators, and that those who suffered from the Holocaust relive the experience in what he terms "durational" time.

I found Professor Langer's theses convincing and distressing. I share with him his praise of Daniel Goldhagen's assertion that hatred can be used as the means by which we understand the motivation of the killers. Indeed, I think his introductory essay was the strongest of the collection, for in it, Professor Langer summarizes the conclusions of the following essays. His assertion that: "The very image of machinery [the Holocaust as done by a "killing machine"] rather than man as the primary instrument of liquidation tends to absolve individual offenders and obscure the identity and the catalyst of the very culprits who initiated and carried out the crime."

Both scholars and people of conscience would do well to include this volume in their libraries.

1 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars disrespectful, May 20, 2003

By 

JENNIFER PEDDICORD (LAPLATA, MARYLAND USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Preempting the Holocaust (Hardcover)

I read The Ruins of Memory and was disgusted! Mr. Langer was disrespectful in more than a few instances to the testamonies of the survivors. After reading this book I can tell you that I will never waste my money on another one of his books. How dare he attempt to discredit thier stories and thier feelings!!!! I gave one star only because he is able to put words together and make sentances!