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A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction
A Thousand Darknesses takes a provocative look at the primary works of literature about the Holocaust, arguing that the line between fact and fiction, memoir and novel, is all but impossible to draw.
272 pages, Paperback
First published October 12, 2010
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August 9, 2017
From my review for the Jewish Quarterly:
The subtitle of Ruth Franklin’s A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction is a sleight of hand, simultaneously misleading and subtly revealing about her agenda in this intelligent and clear-minded overview of writing about the Holocaust, with a focus on what the author reticently calls “the canon”. Outright lies play only the smallest part in her argument; Franklin is above needing to flog the dead horse that is Wilkomerski or other “falsifiers” – those kinds of deceptions don’t particularly interest her. Fiction interests her enormously, however, and by using the word to describe her topic, she is taking the first in a series of careful steps.
Each brings the reader closer to Franklin’s understanding that what matters is not whether accounts are fully factual, but in what manner and spirit survivors (and, controversially, other writers) choose to present the Holocaust. Those who have done it most successfully, she argues, are those who, whatever they may say to the contrary, have used fiction’s potent mixture of truth and falsification to create what we usually call “art”. “Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction” isn’t just a subject; it’s a blueprint, according to which without the first two, there cannot, by definition, be the third.
By following the genesis and editorial history of works claiming to eschew style for pure fact, Franklin finds that all the greatest “Holocaust writers” (some, particularly Primo Levi, would deny the label) came to edit and shape their experiences into works of literature so they might be all the more valuable as acts of testimony. This is something many would prefer not to believe. It not only implies that memory is flawed (as a record, perhaps, but more importantly as a means of proof), but also presents the argument – based here on the quality of the work itself – for fiction, i.e., an untrue thing, as an important medium for sharing survivors’ knowledge of something real and true.
Elie Wiesel in particular has been vocal about the nearly oracular nature of Holocaust writing, saying that if something is art, it can’t be about Auschwitz. Franklin understands his worry: art is always about the universal, and for Wiesel, the Holocaust is not an experience that can be shared. She carefully notes, however, that Night, when originally published in Yiddish under the title Un di velt hot geshvign (And the world was silent), was a very different book, perhaps 700 pages longer than the work we now know, and one that was later carefully re-written for maximum impact: it is, in other words, the work of an author – literature – and shows the great skill of its creator. She also observes that Night has variously been categorised as a memoir and as a novel; although she hints at a sense that the labels might be superfluous, Franklin still leans towards the latter, especially since one of Night’s most powerful themes is the narrator’s loss of religious faith, an experience Wiesel steadfastly denies ever having.
Franklin correctly points out that survivors are not homogenous: their backgrounds and experiences of and after the camps were all markedly different, as are the techniques by which they choose to share their experiences. Some authors feel ill at ease with the idea of a factual account. Piotr Rawicz even goes so far as to obfuscate and confuse, so that the story he tells cannot easily be considered documentary. In this way the writer refuses to be accused either of lying or of telling the truth, an implication that the experience of the camps can’t be reduced to facts. Franklin more than once quotes Imre Kertész on the story of a child born in Auschwitz: “It happened, yet it’s still not true.” If “Some events do take place but are not true; others are – although they never occurred”, as Wiesel himself wrote, then the argument for fiction as a vessel of truth arises organically from the experiences of survivors.
From the stepping stone of fiction as a means of testimony, Franklin can argue for an end to the sacrosanct status of the Holocaust as something that can never be known, understood, or spoken – as, essentially, a mystical (and therefore unique) rather than earthly experience. Guards and prisoners alike were people – if we turn them into creatures from a magic netherworld, we lose our ability to draw conclusions and apply them to our own actions, as surely we should: otherwise why must we “never forget”? Art, with its tendency to universalise, is precisely what will help us remember.
In light of this, Franklin is forgiving of writers who are less than accurate about their personal histories, but strict with those who would deny the universal nature of suffering, whether Wiesel at his most censorious or the second generation (so-called “2G”) writers – the children of survivors – who claim to have “inherited” knowledge of the Holocaust and the right to keep it for their sole use. She is also forgiving of novelists such as Wolfgang Koeppen, who used the experiences of others as the basis for writing fiction that was nonetheless faithful to the truth and effective as literature. Koeppen never claimed, after all, that the story was his own – only that it was he who wrote it.
Franklin’s seeming need to defend each instance of creative latitude, to reiterate in each chapter the value of “fictionalised” experience, can seem almost obsessive, but there is good reason for this: the quest to make her point has a sub-text, and although the issue is only occasionally mentioned, A Thousand Darknesses is haunted by the spectre of denial. If Franklin is forced at moments to defend minutiae it is because that is where Holocaust deniers dig for their trophies, like feral animals in debris – if the smallest detail is wrong, they are ready at any moment to demand, then might not the whole thing be a lie? Since Holocaust deniers can never be shaken in a belief that was never in any case based on fact or logic, it seems a waste of time to spend so much energy fending them off, but the urge is comprehensible, and a reminder that such ideas lurk within our culture is always timely.
The book’s least effective passages are asides leading down paths that aren’t – and in this format can’t be – properly investigated. One is about the moral apathy German author Peter Schneider found when discussing the Holocaust with his younger compatriots. They were not ill-informed, and hoped they might behave better than their grandparents’ generation if faced with the same circumstances, but they felt no ethical obligation to judge those who had done wrong in the past. This is a vast topic, and one it is perhaps unfair to introduce in such abbreviated form. I suspect, for example, that a similar survey among Americans or Britons today might find a similar passivity. The phenomenon isn’t new, either: whatever else you might say about them, the fact remains that the Red Army Faction (commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang) was one of only a handful of groups – all radical – to point out that the post-war German government was packed with known Nazis, and to act on that information; meanwhile war criminals were smuggled to America in the name of anti-Communism.
Average Germans back then ignored the obvious out of shame or for self-protection, but why should anyone now? Is it because to take history seriously we would have also to take seriously the actions committed on our behalf in Iraq and elsewhere? Or is it simply because time has disarmed the past, and as Shaw rightly said, most people can’t be troubled with things that don’t trouble them? The possible answers would need a book of their own.
Franklin also indulges in a long digression into the psychology of transference for her discussion of 2G writers – so obsessed with the Holocaust they use their parents’ camp tattoos as their ATM codes or even have them reproduced on their own arms, and whose fictional work is all about their second-hand experience – some claim it is genetic – of the camps (one even titled his book Second Hand Smoke). Rather than simply call the 2Gs shrill and annoying, Franklin seeks out unnecessary scientific proof that they are shrill and annoying. At least as a literary critic she is not so timid: she finds their work generally very bad, and doesn’t hesitate to say so. The examples she gives are some of the most uncomfortably funny moments in a rarely light-hearted book.
A Thousand Darknesses ends with a sudden shift, in the form of a personal story: when her son was born, someone sent Franklin a children’s story set in Theresienstadt. The injection of a “genre” book into a study that had so far been about literature (or, in the case of the 2Gs, something at least trying to be literature) might reasonably cause the reader to panic, for it introduces a trend that could make all Franklin has written, however well-argued, thoughtful, and true, strangely besides the point.
This is something Franklin doesn’t address in her discussion, something she may in fact be too high-minded even to see, but the children’s book is the herald of a thing far more disturbing in its way than any falsified memoir. It is not a matter of lies, or of bearing witness; it is not even about using the suffering of others to bring gravitas to otherwise unexceptional writing. It is the “genrefication” of the Holocaust, a process well under way, that is most frightening. There are already, after all, Holocaust-inspired cookbooks (In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin). The war, the camps, the Einsatzgruppen, the cattle cars, the very gas chambers themselves, are becoming no more than backdrops in the minds of many, including many canny writers and their cannier publishers.
Just as serial killers have become, in America, the heroes of humorous televised family dramas, the characters now familiar to us all – the cruel commandant, the willing executioner, the “good Nazi”, the flunky prisoner desperate to survive, the martyr who gives up his life for a shred of dignity – must join the list of literary tropes and types from which even the most unengaged may choose when preparing their tenner dreadfuls. The time is not far off when a clever author who is not otherwise immoral or even unpleasant, who is kind to children and animals, will sit down to write a detective novel, and, looking for a new angle, something guaranteed to generate a lot of reviews and excite the punters, will hear the sound of a lucrative penny dropping into the very deepest abyss of disposable culture: “Of course! I’ll set it in Auschwitz. The detective is an inmate, a Kapo will play the role of the tough police lieutenant …”
Do not doubt that the book I am describing will be written – indeed, it may already be in its second draft. As Dr. Johnson said of Gulliver’s Travels, once you’ve thought of big men and little men, the rest is easy – in modern parlance, this stuff writes itself. If it is done right, with a lot of plausible detail set out in innocuous, greeting-card prose, if it is sentimental and has a great moment of redemption for someone, then it will be published, and, because of its “unusual” setting, widely reviewed and much read. Some will denounce it as a gimmick – but only the first time.
That is the future of Holocaust writing; novelists such as Jonathan Littell and John Boyne have pulled back the curtain to reveal the Janus face – alternately offensive and bland – of the beast. There is no escaping it – or rather, it seemed there wasn’t. One of the wonderful things about Ruth Franklin’s book is that despite the gloom of the subject matter, her thoughtfulness of approach casts a glow that is comforting: to be led by her intelligence, erudition, and charity, her always engaging and sometimes gently humorous prose, is to feel that, whatever the worst excesses of the market, there will always be someone to whom the important questions still matter.
The subtitle of Ruth Franklin’s A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction is a sleight of hand, simultaneously misleading and subtly revealing about her agenda in this intelligent and clear-minded overview of writing about the Holocaust, with a focus on what the author reticently calls “the canon”. Outright lies play only the smallest part in her argument; Franklin is above needing to flog the dead horse that is Wilkomerski or other “falsifiers” – those kinds of deceptions don’t particularly interest her. Fiction interests her enormously, however, and by using the word to describe her topic, she is taking the first in a series of careful steps.
Each brings the reader closer to Franklin’s understanding that what matters is not whether accounts are fully factual, but in what manner and spirit survivors (and, controversially, other writers) choose to present the Holocaust. Those who have done it most successfully, she argues, are those who, whatever they may say to the contrary, have used fiction’s potent mixture of truth and falsification to create what we usually call “art”. “Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction” isn’t just a subject; it’s a blueprint, according to which without the first two, there cannot, by definition, be the third.
By following the genesis and editorial history of works claiming to eschew style for pure fact, Franklin finds that all the greatest “Holocaust writers” (some, particularly Primo Levi, would deny the label) came to edit and shape their experiences into works of literature so they might be all the more valuable as acts of testimony. This is something many would prefer not to believe. It not only implies that memory is flawed (as a record, perhaps, but more importantly as a means of proof), but also presents the argument – based here on the quality of the work itself – for fiction, i.e., an untrue thing, as an important medium for sharing survivors’ knowledge of something real and true.
Elie Wiesel in particular has been vocal about the nearly oracular nature of Holocaust writing, saying that if something is art, it can’t be about Auschwitz. Franklin understands his worry: art is always about the universal, and for Wiesel, the Holocaust is not an experience that can be shared. She carefully notes, however, that Night, when originally published in Yiddish under the title Un di velt hot geshvign (And the world was silent), was a very different book, perhaps 700 pages longer than the work we now know, and one that was later carefully re-written for maximum impact: it is, in other words, the work of an author – literature – and shows the great skill of its creator. She also observes that Night has variously been categorised as a memoir and as a novel; although she hints at a sense that the labels might be superfluous, Franklin still leans towards the latter, especially since one of Night’s most powerful themes is the narrator’s loss of religious faith, an experience Wiesel steadfastly denies ever having.
Franklin correctly points out that survivors are not homogenous: their backgrounds and experiences of and after the camps were all markedly different, as are the techniques by which they choose to share their experiences. Some authors feel ill at ease with the idea of a factual account. Piotr Rawicz even goes so far as to obfuscate and confuse, so that the story he tells cannot easily be considered documentary. In this way the writer refuses to be accused either of lying or of telling the truth, an implication that the experience of the camps can’t be reduced to facts. Franklin more than once quotes Imre Kertész on the story of a child born in Auschwitz: “It happened, yet it’s still not true.” If “Some events do take place but are not true; others are – although they never occurred”, as Wiesel himself wrote, then the argument for fiction as a vessel of truth arises organically from the experiences of survivors.
From the stepping stone of fiction as a means of testimony, Franklin can argue for an end to the sacrosanct status of the Holocaust as something that can never be known, understood, or spoken – as, essentially, a mystical (and therefore unique) rather than earthly experience. Guards and prisoners alike were people – if we turn them into creatures from a magic netherworld, we lose our ability to draw conclusions and apply them to our own actions, as surely we should: otherwise why must we “never forget”? Art, with its tendency to universalise, is precisely what will help us remember.
In light of this, Franklin is forgiving of writers who are less than accurate about their personal histories, but strict with those who would deny the universal nature of suffering, whether Wiesel at his most censorious or the second generation (so-called “2G”) writers – the children of survivors – who claim to have “inherited” knowledge of the Holocaust and the right to keep it for their sole use. She is also forgiving of novelists such as Wolfgang Koeppen, who used the experiences of others as the basis for writing fiction that was nonetheless faithful to the truth and effective as literature. Koeppen never claimed, after all, that the story was his own – only that it was he who wrote it.
Franklin’s seeming need to defend each instance of creative latitude, to reiterate in each chapter the value of “fictionalised” experience, can seem almost obsessive, but there is good reason for this: the quest to make her point has a sub-text, and although the issue is only occasionally mentioned, A Thousand Darknesses is haunted by the spectre of denial. If Franklin is forced at moments to defend minutiae it is because that is where Holocaust deniers dig for their trophies, like feral animals in debris – if the smallest detail is wrong, they are ready at any moment to demand, then might not the whole thing be a lie? Since Holocaust deniers can never be shaken in a belief that was never in any case based on fact or logic, it seems a waste of time to spend so much energy fending them off, but the urge is comprehensible, and a reminder that such ideas lurk within our culture is always timely.
The book’s least effective passages are asides leading down paths that aren’t – and in this format can’t be – properly investigated. One is about the moral apathy German author Peter Schneider found when discussing the Holocaust with his younger compatriots. They were not ill-informed, and hoped they might behave better than their grandparents’ generation if faced with the same circumstances, but they felt no ethical obligation to judge those who had done wrong in the past. This is a vast topic, and one it is perhaps unfair to introduce in such abbreviated form. I suspect, for example, that a similar survey among Americans or Britons today might find a similar passivity. The phenomenon isn’t new, either: whatever else you might say about them, the fact remains that the Red Army Faction (commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang) was one of only a handful of groups – all radical – to point out that the post-war German government was packed with known Nazis, and to act on that information; meanwhile war criminals were smuggled to America in the name of anti-Communism.
Average Germans back then ignored the obvious out of shame or for self-protection, but why should anyone now? Is it because to take history seriously we would have also to take seriously the actions committed on our behalf in Iraq and elsewhere? Or is it simply because time has disarmed the past, and as Shaw rightly said, most people can’t be troubled with things that don’t trouble them? The possible answers would need a book of their own.
Franklin also indulges in a long digression into the psychology of transference for her discussion of 2G writers – so obsessed with the Holocaust they use their parents’ camp tattoos as their ATM codes or even have them reproduced on their own arms, and whose fictional work is all about their second-hand experience – some claim it is genetic – of the camps (one even titled his book Second Hand Smoke). Rather than simply call the 2Gs shrill and annoying, Franklin seeks out unnecessary scientific proof that they are shrill and annoying. At least as a literary critic she is not so timid: she finds their work generally very bad, and doesn’t hesitate to say so. The examples she gives are some of the most uncomfortably funny moments in a rarely light-hearted book.
A Thousand Darknesses ends with a sudden shift, in the form of a personal story: when her son was born, someone sent Franklin a children’s story set in Theresienstadt. The injection of a “genre” book into a study that had so far been about literature (or, in the case of the 2Gs, something at least trying to be literature) might reasonably cause the reader to panic, for it introduces a trend that could make all Franklin has written, however well-argued, thoughtful, and true, strangely besides the point.
This is something Franklin doesn’t address in her discussion, something she may in fact be too high-minded even to see, but the children’s book is the herald of a thing far more disturbing in its way than any falsified memoir. It is not a matter of lies, or of bearing witness; it is not even about using the suffering of others to bring gravitas to otherwise unexceptional writing. It is the “genrefication” of the Holocaust, a process well under way, that is most frightening. There are already, after all, Holocaust-inspired cookbooks (In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin). The war, the camps, the Einsatzgruppen, the cattle cars, the very gas chambers themselves, are becoming no more than backdrops in the minds of many, including many canny writers and their cannier publishers.
Just as serial killers have become, in America, the heroes of humorous televised family dramas, the characters now familiar to us all – the cruel commandant, the willing executioner, the “good Nazi”, the flunky prisoner desperate to survive, the martyr who gives up his life for a shred of dignity – must join the list of literary tropes and types from which even the most unengaged may choose when preparing their tenner dreadfuls. The time is not far off when a clever author who is not otherwise immoral or even unpleasant, who is kind to children and animals, will sit down to write a detective novel, and, looking for a new angle, something guaranteed to generate a lot of reviews and excite the punters, will hear the sound of a lucrative penny dropping into the very deepest abyss of disposable culture: “Of course! I’ll set it in Auschwitz. The detective is an inmate, a Kapo will play the role of the tough police lieutenant …”
Do not doubt that the book I am describing will be written – indeed, it may already be in its second draft. As Dr. Johnson said of Gulliver’s Travels, once you’ve thought of big men and little men, the rest is easy – in modern parlance, this stuff writes itself. If it is done right, with a lot of plausible detail set out in innocuous, greeting-card prose, if it is sentimental and has a great moment of redemption for someone, then it will be published, and, because of its “unusual” setting, widely reviewed and much read. Some will denounce it as a gimmick – but only the first time.
That is the future of Holocaust writing; novelists such as Jonathan Littell and John Boyne have pulled back the curtain to reveal the Janus face – alternately offensive and bland – of the beast. There is no escaping it – or rather, it seemed there wasn’t. One of the wonderful things about Ruth Franklin’s book is that despite the gloom of the subject matter, her thoughtfulness of approach casts a glow that is comforting: to be led by her intelligence, erudition, and charity, her always engaging and sometimes gently humorous prose, is to feel that, whatever the worst excesses of the market, there will always be someone to whom the important questions still matter.
January 30, 2019
A fascinating and rigorous and moral and ruthless examination of the nature of "truth" in fictional representations of the Holocaust--how fiction can reveal the truth, and when it obscures it instead.
May 21, 2018
On one of the very last pages of this book, I think that author and literary reviewer Ruth Franklin criticized the preconceived notion that I entered with: "It is no accident that those who oppose the idea of literary representation of the Holocaust also tend to be those who argue most forcefully for the Holocaust's uniqueness. For literature, whatever its specific details, ultimately makes a case for universality." Maybe I'm being too hard on myself. Ok, so before reading the cover copy, I was intrigued by this title because of what I see as a proliferation of Holocaust-related material numbing humankind to the actual horror of it. (Franklin also addresses this, but thinks that, say, "Schindler's List" winning best picture kinda precludes humankind from "not caring anymore." I'm more cynical. Besides, that movie was kinda like the peak before the descent--the blockbuster that ENCOURAGED a mind-numbing proliferation. Anywho.)
From the cover copy of this book, it's easily understandable that Franklin's primary goal is to apply literary criticism to Holocaust literature. That's a fraught endeavor in and of itself, because the general line is to treat everything as sacrosanct testimony. Fiction often gets a bad rap in the world of Holocaust literature, for daring to "mess" with the truth, but Franklin proves how weak an argument this is. Most of the writers she chronicles have a bit of fact AND fiction in their work. Also, of late, there have been several Holocaust "memoirs" that have been debunked as frauds, so suddenly they aren't holy objects anymore anyway. But in providing literary criticism, we can approach all Holocaust literature based on the sum of its parts, not its factual veracity. (And yes, this dips close to inviting in those swooping vultures, the Holocaust deniers, but Franklin is always there to wave them away. There is a difference, after all, between "fiction" and "lies.")
Franklin divides her book into two sections--"The Witnesses" (aka survivors, mostly Jews but also political dissident Tadeusz Borowski) and "Those Who Came After." Almost all of the witnesses spent time in Auschwitz and wrote a lot about Auschwitz, even if they wanted their writing careers to ultimately extend beyond that. But what I mean to say is that Franklin almost gives into the idea that Auschwitz, so easily identifiable by the tattoos and the crematoriums that killed 1 million of the 6 million Jews, is ALL of the Holocaust. Just made me wonder if we could diversify a little bit, or if its just fact that the most well known survivor writers came out of Auschwitz. But I'm also uncomfortably aware of how few of these people I've actually read. I guess I mostly feel the call to Primo Levi, mostly because of his biography rather than anything Franklin wrote about. Admittedly, it's difficult to read literary criticism of works and authors I haven't read, and Franklin's language could be a little stuffy.
The one survivor on Franlkin's list that I did read was Elie Wiesel. I haven't been familiar with NIGHT since high school, but she analyses the book's factual fidelity vs poetic austerity--it's testimony and it's spiritual journey. But more broadly, she acknowledges Wiesel, may his memory be for a blessing, as one of, if not the most infamous Holocaust survivors in the world. And surely in the United States, at least, he's acted as a prophet, dictating a lot of what is acceptable and unacceptable in Holocaust art. Franklin is somewhat critical of his narrow range of approval: "Wiesel is not the only critic to have felt a pang of disquiet as the Holocaust in American culture experienced its strange transformation from unmentionable to ubiquitous. But this reasonable concern is swallowed up by the bombast of his rhetoric. Wiesel's insistence on the absolute uniqueness of the Holocaust--not simply as a political or historical event, but as a metaphysical event--renders it untouchable except by the initiated. 'Let us repeat it again,' he wrote in 'Art and the Holocaust': 'Auschwitz is something else, always something else. It is a universe outside the universe, a creation that exists parallel to creation.' ...What does it mean to say that Auschwitz is 'always something else'? In sheer point of fact, it wasn't 'a universe outside the universe.' It may have *felt* as though it existed beyond the world of humankind, but it was a real place with a geographic location easily discovered on the map, conceived and designed and run by human beings. And in the face of the great works of fiction and nonfiction that have come to constitute the literature of the death camps--some written by 'those who lived it in their flesh and in their minds' but some written also by those, such as Cynthia Ozick, who did not--how can anyone truly believe that 'no one can now retell Auschwitz after Auschwitz'?"
When Franklin moves on to "the next generation," intriguingly she doesn't single out "the second generation" (the children of survivors) in individual chapters. Her reasoning becomes apparent when we get to the one chapter where she lumps all of them--she thinks their so-called association with the Holocaust, as depicted in fiction, is overwrought. "Ironically, though, Bukiet and Rosenbaum have been at the forefront of what is surely one of the most disturbing trends in contemporary Jewish literature. Call it Wilkomiski-ism [one of the Holocaust memoirists who turned out to be a fraud]: driven by ambition, guilt, envy or sheer narcissism, a number of the children of survivors--commonly referred to as 'the second generation'--have constructed elaborate literary fictions in which they identify so strongly with the sufferings of their parents as to assert themselves as witnesses to the Holocaust. They do not actually believe that they suffered in the camps, obviously. They are not quite as deluded as Wilkomirski, though some deck themselves out in trappings of pseudo authenticity not unlike Wilomirski's yarmulke and shawl. But they have convinced themselves, often by means of complicated maneuverings in postmodernism and trauma theory, that they are in some essential way primary in this dark story--that the second generation's 'memories' of the Holocaust are as valid as those of the survivors."
I don't fault her for the analysis of some melodramatic-sounding stories, but this general argument seems rather dismissive. She makes Holocaust generational trauma sound like some fad rather than supported by the scientific study of genetics...though to be fair, I think those studies came out after she published this book. :P So maybe I should give her a break. But in general, I think there's room to feel something for the experiences of the second generation, and I rather wish she'd found more than just one second gen Jewish writer to appreciate.
When it comes to the third generation--and Franklin's generation, as her grandparents are survivors--she's a lot more forgiving. She likes the speculative, somewhat abstract style of Jonathan Safran Foer and Michael Chabon. Another nitpick--Franklin documented far more male writers than she did female ones. Her analysis of Cynthia Ozick didn't really go any deeper than that quote from above. Then again, it's modern day female writers who give me the most pause, for their sentimental-sounding returns to the Holocaust backdrop. But am I being too harsh? Another big part of this book's argument is that the Holocaust is way too big to just contain one story. It's accepted even more generally that the premise for every story's been done before--quality depends on what the writer does with the specifics.
To circle back to Franklin's other "people who came after," it's mostly non-Jews (Germans chief among them) who mold their stories after survivor testimonies or other aspects of Holocaust history. She did include Steven Spielberg and "Schindler's List" in here, because it's an adaptation of Thomas Keneally's Booker Prize winning SCHINDLER'S ARC. Whether or not his book is actually fiction is more up in the air. Franklin touches upon what some people call "the nonfiction novel," where something with embellished characters or situations is based on archival fact a la IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote. Spielberg then made changes to Keneally's book, as is the case with all movie adaptations. Meanwhile, I'm growing more disenchanted with the world's most popular Holocaust film, because as Village Voice critic J. Hoberman put it, "This is a movie about World War II in which all the Jews live." It's way beyond the pale of the usual Holocaust experience, and the main character focus is on the Nazi operative! But Franklin poo-poos me: "Despite these inherent problems, the fact remains that there may be no better way to write a novel, or a novelistic work (since Keneally's book cannot properly be called a novel) about the Holocaust, as long as the teller recognizes that he's telling 'a' story and not 'the' story--a fact of which novelists are usually well aware."
Franklin may like the artistic merit of the Schindler story, but she's much more wary of the moral relativism at play in Bernard Schlink's THE READER, which was later turned into a film starring Kate Winslet. I've always been wary of them, and her take makes me want to stay away: "'The Reader' hinted at very serious ethical questions but did not make an effort to provoke any kind of rigorous thought. Instead, it offered an alternative: a way to feel as though one were therapeutically 'working through' the problems of the past while in fact remaining comfortably aloof. Perhaps it is unfair to expect a novel to answer unanswerable questions. But it does have an obligation to attend to the skeletons it removes from the closet rather than stuffing them under the rug."
But if I'm going to use Franklin as my guide, I'm now more intrigued to read AUSTERLITZ by W.G. Sebald, which my mother gifted me recently. Sebald was a German born near the end of the war who did the same sort of "nonfiction novel" hodge podge. She calls him a hyperrealist and infers that he spends a lot of time on nuanced characters. If that works for me against other backdrops, it should work for me in the Holocaust and its aftermath, too.
From the cover copy of this book, it's easily understandable that Franklin's primary goal is to apply literary criticism to Holocaust literature. That's a fraught endeavor in and of itself, because the general line is to treat everything as sacrosanct testimony. Fiction often gets a bad rap in the world of Holocaust literature, for daring to "mess" with the truth, but Franklin proves how weak an argument this is. Most of the writers she chronicles have a bit of fact AND fiction in their work. Also, of late, there have been several Holocaust "memoirs" that have been debunked as frauds, so suddenly they aren't holy objects anymore anyway. But in providing literary criticism, we can approach all Holocaust literature based on the sum of its parts, not its factual veracity. (And yes, this dips close to inviting in those swooping vultures, the Holocaust deniers, but Franklin is always there to wave them away. There is a difference, after all, between "fiction" and "lies.")
Franklin divides her book into two sections--"The Witnesses" (aka survivors, mostly Jews but also political dissident Tadeusz Borowski) and "Those Who Came After." Almost all of the witnesses spent time in Auschwitz and wrote a lot about Auschwitz, even if they wanted their writing careers to ultimately extend beyond that. But what I mean to say is that Franklin almost gives into the idea that Auschwitz, so easily identifiable by the tattoos and the crematoriums that killed 1 million of the 6 million Jews, is ALL of the Holocaust. Just made me wonder if we could diversify a little bit, or if its just fact that the most well known survivor writers came out of Auschwitz. But I'm also uncomfortably aware of how few of these people I've actually read. I guess I mostly feel the call to Primo Levi, mostly because of his biography rather than anything Franklin wrote about. Admittedly, it's difficult to read literary criticism of works and authors I haven't read, and Franklin's language could be a little stuffy.
The one survivor on Franlkin's list that I did read was Elie Wiesel. I haven't been familiar with NIGHT since high school, but she analyses the book's factual fidelity vs poetic austerity--it's testimony and it's spiritual journey. But more broadly, she acknowledges Wiesel, may his memory be for a blessing, as one of, if not the most infamous Holocaust survivors in the world. And surely in the United States, at least, he's acted as a prophet, dictating a lot of what is acceptable and unacceptable in Holocaust art. Franklin is somewhat critical of his narrow range of approval: "Wiesel is not the only critic to have felt a pang of disquiet as the Holocaust in American culture experienced its strange transformation from unmentionable to ubiquitous. But this reasonable concern is swallowed up by the bombast of his rhetoric. Wiesel's insistence on the absolute uniqueness of the Holocaust--not simply as a political or historical event, but as a metaphysical event--renders it untouchable except by the initiated. 'Let us repeat it again,' he wrote in 'Art and the Holocaust': 'Auschwitz is something else, always something else. It is a universe outside the universe, a creation that exists parallel to creation.' ...What does it mean to say that Auschwitz is 'always something else'? In sheer point of fact, it wasn't 'a universe outside the universe.' It may have *felt* as though it existed beyond the world of humankind, but it was a real place with a geographic location easily discovered on the map, conceived and designed and run by human beings. And in the face of the great works of fiction and nonfiction that have come to constitute the literature of the death camps--some written by 'those who lived it in their flesh and in their minds' but some written also by those, such as Cynthia Ozick, who did not--how can anyone truly believe that 'no one can now retell Auschwitz after Auschwitz'?"
When Franklin moves on to "the next generation," intriguingly she doesn't single out "the second generation" (the children of survivors) in individual chapters. Her reasoning becomes apparent when we get to the one chapter where she lumps all of them--she thinks their so-called association with the Holocaust, as depicted in fiction, is overwrought. "Ironically, though, Bukiet and Rosenbaum have been at the forefront of what is surely one of the most disturbing trends in contemporary Jewish literature. Call it Wilkomiski-ism [one of the Holocaust memoirists who turned out to be a fraud]: driven by ambition, guilt, envy or sheer narcissism, a number of the children of survivors--commonly referred to as 'the second generation'--have constructed elaborate literary fictions in which they identify so strongly with the sufferings of their parents as to assert themselves as witnesses to the Holocaust. They do not actually believe that they suffered in the camps, obviously. They are not quite as deluded as Wilkomirski, though some deck themselves out in trappings of pseudo authenticity not unlike Wilomirski's yarmulke and shawl. But they have convinced themselves, often by means of complicated maneuverings in postmodernism and trauma theory, that they are in some essential way primary in this dark story--that the second generation's 'memories' of the Holocaust are as valid as those of the survivors."
I don't fault her for the analysis of some melodramatic-sounding stories, but this general argument seems rather dismissive. She makes Holocaust generational trauma sound like some fad rather than supported by the scientific study of genetics...though to be fair, I think those studies came out after she published this book. :P So maybe I should give her a break. But in general, I think there's room to feel something for the experiences of the second generation, and I rather wish she'd found more than just one second gen Jewish writer to appreciate.
When it comes to the third generation--and Franklin's generation, as her grandparents are survivors--she's a lot more forgiving. She likes the speculative, somewhat abstract style of Jonathan Safran Foer and Michael Chabon. Another nitpick--Franklin documented far more male writers than she did female ones. Her analysis of Cynthia Ozick didn't really go any deeper than that quote from above. Then again, it's modern day female writers who give me the most pause, for their sentimental-sounding returns to the Holocaust backdrop. But am I being too harsh? Another big part of this book's argument is that the Holocaust is way too big to just contain one story. It's accepted even more generally that the premise for every story's been done before--quality depends on what the writer does with the specifics.
To circle back to Franklin's other "people who came after," it's mostly non-Jews (Germans chief among them) who mold their stories after survivor testimonies or other aspects of Holocaust history. She did include Steven Spielberg and "Schindler's List" in here, because it's an adaptation of Thomas Keneally's Booker Prize winning SCHINDLER'S ARC. Whether or not his book is actually fiction is more up in the air. Franklin touches upon what some people call "the nonfiction novel," where something with embellished characters or situations is based on archival fact a la IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote. Spielberg then made changes to Keneally's book, as is the case with all movie adaptations. Meanwhile, I'm growing more disenchanted with the world's most popular Holocaust film, because as Village Voice critic J. Hoberman put it, "This is a movie about World War II in which all the Jews live." It's way beyond the pale of the usual Holocaust experience, and the main character focus is on the Nazi operative! But Franklin poo-poos me: "Despite these inherent problems, the fact remains that there may be no better way to write a novel, or a novelistic work (since Keneally's book cannot properly be called a novel) about the Holocaust, as long as the teller recognizes that he's telling 'a' story and not 'the' story--a fact of which novelists are usually well aware."
Franklin may like the artistic merit of the Schindler story, but she's much more wary of the moral relativism at play in Bernard Schlink's THE READER, which was later turned into a film starring Kate Winslet. I've always been wary of them, and her take makes me want to stay away: "'The Reader' hinted at very serious ethical questions but did not make an effort to provoke any kind of rigorous thought. Instead, it offered an alternative: a way to feel as though one were therapeutically 'working through' the problems of the past while in fact remaining comfortably aloof. Perhaps it is unfair to expect a novel to answer unanswerable questions. But it does have an obligation to attend to the skeletons it removes from the closet rather than stuffing them under the rug."
But if I'm going to use Franklin as my guide, I'm now more intrigued to read AUSTERLITZ by W.G. Sebald, which my mother gifted me recently. Sebald was a German born near the end of the war who did the same sort of "nonfiction novel" hodge podge. She calls him a hyperrealist and infers that he spends a lot of time on nuanced characters. If that works for me against other backdrops, it should work for me in the Holocaust and its aftermath, too.
August 25, 2013
It is truly wondrous when an author possesses such an authoritative voice and passion for her subject that she can fully immerse the reader into the topics and issues she holds so dear. For an area easily considered (at first glance) dry, or overwrought-- indeed, the author acknowledges "Holocaust fatigue," among other important subjects, head on--Ms. Franklin's fervor and fascination quickly becomes the reader's own. Exhaustive in its analysis yet always engaging, doggedly researched but never lacking a humanizing, personal element of its subjects, "A Thousand Darknesses" is a masterful, mesmerizing compendium of three generations of Holocaust literature.
Seven decades on-- as the last of the survivors in our midst are passing-- a work of this nature is more important than ever. For the "fourth generation" now coming up through grade school, Franklin's work will serve as a touching conclusion-- or perhaps the perfect starting point-- for newcomers to learn and choose how to immerse themselves into the reams of material available. It will also pose as a helpful guide for them to heed caution, since they will undoubtedly encounter conundrums and contradictions in the works available along the way. Franklin deftly reveals how even the literary "touchstones," held high in the public consciousness (Shindler's Ark- converted to film as Shindler's List), are rife with exaggerations, embellishments, or outright fictionalizations, while condemned works were correctly called "novels" all along (Kosinksi) but simply interpreted otherwise, although said authors, on the literary upswing, were not so quick to clarify misconceptions. But can heralded and censured works alike nonetheless be worthy of our affection? In a nuanced, impassioned (but always reasoned) tone, the author makes the case that indeed, most can, even after an her impressive deconstruction-- which she rightfully finds preferable to more the common uncritical and overblown praise.
Our collective infatuation with the Holocaust's unspeakable tragedy now seems to be subsiding, but earlier eras offered an array of artistic interpretation, from straightforward factual accounts (Weisel, Borowski) that condemned anything derivative or indulgent to more taboo interpretations involving poetic license (Levi, Rawicz) to outright usurpations of authentic narratives by frauds (Wilkomirski) and later descendants (Schlink-German; Rosenbaum- of Jewish survivors). Not a shade of this is missed by Franklin's all-encompassing analysis, the work at times even delving into more over-arching paradoxes of psychological (unreliability of witness accounts, poetic license even in the later synthesis of real experiences), cultural (literary careers defined by "authenticity" leading to fraud and embellishments), linguistic (Franklin engages in many direct translations, and takes to task original translations, by so-called scholars and blood relatives), religious / philosophical (whether any sense can be made by unspeakable suffering, and whether faith is justified in its aftermath) and legal importance (statutes of limitations and limited scope of certain prosecutions). There are candid reveals, counterweight stances against normative trends of praised and discredit authors, and surprising revelations.
Through Franklin's work, newcomers and erudite scholars alike can choose how to (further) immerse themselves, taking stock of the varying shades of artistic influence inspired by this 20th century horror, and ensure-- most importantly-- that we never forget.
Seven decades on-- as the last of the survivors in our midst are passing-- a work of this nature is more important than ever. For the "fourth generation" now coming up through grade school, Franklin's work will serve as a touching conclusion-- or perhaps the perfect starting point-- for newcomers to learn and choose how to immerse themselves into the reams of material available. It will also pose as a helpful guide for them to heed caution, since they will undoubtedly encounter conundrums and contradictions in the works available along the way. Franklin deftly reveals how even the literary "touchstones," held high in the public consciousness (Shindler's Ark- converted to film as Shindler's List), are rife with exaggerations, embellishments, or outright fictionalizations, while condemned works were correctly called "novels" all along (Kosinksi) but simply interpreted otherwise, although said authors, on the literary upswing, were not so quick to clarify misconceptions. But can heralded and censured works alike nonetheless be worthy of our affection? In a nuanced, impassioned (but always reasoned) tone, the author makes the case that indeed, most can, even after an her impressive deconstruction-- which she rightfully finds preferable to more the common uncritical and overblown praise.
Our collective infatuation with the Holocaust's unspeakable tragedy now seems to be subsiding, but earlier eras offered an array of artistic interpretation, from straightforward factual accounts (Weisel, Borowski) that condemned anything derivative or indulgent to more taboo interpretations involving poetic license (Levi, Rawicz) to outright usurpations of authentic narratives by frauds (Wilkomirski) and later descendants (Schlink-German; Rosenbaum- of Jewish survivors). Not a shade of this is missed by Franklin's all-encompassing analysis, the work at times even delving into more over-arching paradoxes of psychological (unreliability of witness accounts, poetic license even in the later synthesis of real experiences), cultural (literary careers defined by "authenticity" leading to fraud and embellishments), linguistic (Franklin engages in many direct translations, and takes to task original translations, by so-called scholars and blood relatives), religious / philosophical (whether any sense can be made by unspeakable suffering, and whether faith is justified in its aftermath) and legal importance (statutes of limitations and limited scope of certain prosecutions). There are candid reveals, counterweight stances against normative trends of praised and discredit authors, and surprising revelations.
Through Franklin's work, newcomers and erudite scholars alike can choose how to (further) immerse themselves, taking stock of the varying shades of artistic influence inspired by this 20th century horror, and ensure-- most importantly-- that we never forget.
August 24, 2015
A fascinating tour of the most influential books related to the holocaust. Franklin is particularly deft in her examination of the gray line between holocaust fact and fiction. Important, rigorous work.
July 22, 2021
It's nice to dip back into literary criticism sometimes, although my lazy brain sometimes objects to complicated sentences. This is a discussion of what it means to write about the Holocaust, what it means to create art about it, and how to criticism that art. Is there an authentic voice? Are the limits to what particular people can write? What does it mean to tell a true story -- how far can a memoir deviate from the truth (to simplify things, to choose what to include, to rely on memory rather than documents) before it isn't "true?"
These are questions that affect a lot of books. The chapter on books by the children of survivors, who sometimes appropriate the experiences of their parents, reflects back on the graphic novel Displacement in which the grandchild of a Japanese internment camp survivor finds herself living in a camp herself, which is on the shelf next to They Called Us Enemy, a story by George Takei about his childhood. One is clearly labeled fiction, and the other is based on decades old memories, but I experienced both as conveying a lot of information about history of both events and experiences. Or looking at the #ownvoices movement, and how we navigate any extreme human catastrophe. Hmm. Lots of thoughts.
These are questions that affect a lot of books. The chapter on books by the children of survivors, who sometimes appropriate the experiences of their parents, reflects back on the graphic novel Displacement in which the grandchild of a Japanese internment camp survivor finds herself living in a camp herself, which is on the shelf next to They Called Us Enemy, a story by George Takei about his childhood. One is clearly labeled fiction, and the other is based on decades old memories, but I experienced both as conveying a lot of information about history of both events and experiences. Or looking at the #ownvoices movement, and how we navigate any extreme human catastrophe. Hmm. Lots of thoughts.
December 25, 2025
I thought this book was going to be a critique of (bad) Holocaust fiction; but instead it delved into literature that was believed to be non-fiction, which had some fictional features. It was very well researched, well-written and interesting, but a hard read b/c it discussed what really happened vs. how events were portrayed in the books. This was due in part to publishers who wanted the survivor authors to tone down the horror. And the survivor authors also exercised artistic license which made their narratives compelling, but also opened them up to criticism by Holocaust deniers & anti semites.
November 23, 2019
Well-written and insightful, if not exactly what I thought it would be.
June 1, 2025
I love books that give me additional resources to topics that I am interested in.
October 26, 2013
Ruth Franklin's book on Holocaust truths, lies and deceptions is a must read for those who seek a complete and unjaundiced explanation of Holocaust literature and an introduction to the thorny subject of historical memory. At the same time and just as crucial, Franklin's book should be required reading for 21st century academics, NGO wonks, and human rights activists as a reminder that, in creating historical memory of awful events, hard truths shine brighter than easy wrongs.
This is particularly apt in the context of the transnational justice cascade that has commandeered recent trials in the Americas, where accuracy is subordinated to half-truths and where memory is adjusted in the wrong and dangerous belief that that revisionism is a small price to pay in the quest for vindication of terrible crimes.
This is particularly apt in the context of the transnational justice cascade that has commandeered recent trials in the Americas, where accuracy is subordinated to half-truths and where memory is adjusted in the wrong and dangerous belief that that revisionism is a small price to pay in the quest for vindication of terrible crimes.
August 27, 2011
incredibly written and thoughtful criticism.
February 12, 2014
This it he most important book I've read in a while.
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