"Against All Odds" or the Will to Survive: Moral Conclusions from Narrative Closure

In Spiegelman's narrative the Holocaust is represented as interminable in the sense that the impacts of the historical experience are still alive -- not only some individuals survived, but the Holocaust as a human experience survived as a haunting specter too. The historical reference remains stable and reaffirms the master-narrative of the event, for it shines through even the most private phantasms. The aim of interpretation is to understand precisely the objectivity of the past and not to reduce it to a personal trauma that may be undone by therapy. The aesthetic dimension forms a constant shift between the concreteness of a life's story and its specific teller, and the schematic and abstract transposition in the black-and-white drawing of lines and surfaces which always leave the referred events opaque. The "message" on the historiographical level is: we can tell and retell the stories to reassure our knowledge about them and we can read the scars they left in the present, marking the present as prey to the past; even if we cannot change the past we can try to understand what it did to us. To deepen the understanding of the past as it is encapsulated in the present does not entail completeness of understanding. But in a pragmatic sense it enables us to situate ourselves in relation to the past, to name the past in the present. If the past faded into past(ness) there would be no need to save it from oblivion; it could finally be left to historiographers and experts, and there would be no need for aesthetic representation in the present. One could argue that in all its negativity this kind of aesthetic (re)presents the past in a way that marks the complex difference between a past reaching into the present and a bygone past.13 This difference is at the center of all contemplation about collective memory, and there is no need to repeat it here. The argument is that in the model discussed the Holocaust is kept as "hot" rather than "cold" memory. The difference between "hot" and "cold" memory does not mean that aesthetic presentation is unable to warm up "cold" memory or cool down "hot" memory. On the contrary, the affects and identification strategies inherent in aesthetic representation engender emotional effects.
It could be argued that the philosophical problems raised by this dichotomy demonstrate primarily that the division between "knowing" and "understanding" remains irresoluble, partly because this is not a clear split but more like a zipper which joins and separates at the same time and partly because, horribly, the Holocaust is a supremely human event, a man-made fact which, unlike a natural catastrophe, is not explicable with knowledge about weather conditions or suchlike. This, of course, does not apply specifically to the Holocaust but is the signature of the human condition of all history. "Knowledge" as "understanding" is infinite, "interminable" in the sense used by Freud in his essay on "Analysis Terminable and Interminable." According to Freud, analysis, education and government are by definition excluded from clear closure since perfection can never be achieved in these professions.(2) His distinction between the practical and the theoretical becomes important here for it draws our attention to the aims of our wish to know and understand and to our impossible longing for completeness and closure. In this essay [Sigmund Freud] claims that trauma may be one of the very few psychic phenomena that are accessible to a therapeutic closure since trauma is largely based on accidental (external) rather than constituting (internal) factors. When the ego reworks the traumatic experience in its supposed accidentality, it can regain sovereignty over fears and emotional disturbances by understanding that an "inadequate decision" was taken when it happened. The therapeutic closure is inseparable from the cognitive structure of the trauma, the insight into its accidentality and the "inadequate decision." But even in this case, so the self-critical reservation of the analyst Freud, one never knows whether the continued success of the cure is not also accidental, due only to "a kind fate which has spared [the patient] ordeals that are too severe."(3)