| Abstract | Referring to [Peter Weiss] as a survivor is, of course, a transgression, as Weiss's critics would be the first to point out. [Nelly Sachs] seems to be another matter. Rosenfeld counts her among the "survivors" (110). Why is she granted this status? Because she "was forced to flee from Nazi Germany" and "found a haven in Sweden" -- (Ezrahi, 138)? So did Weiss. Rosenfeld refers to Beckett, whose work he praises as reflecting the world after Auschwitz, as "not a direct survivor of the death camps" (7), the inference being that Beckett (who participated in the French resistance) may in some indirect way be considered a survivor of the concentrationary universe. The problem of terminology is very real, for it determines the status of the writer within the literary discourse on the Holocaust. This in turn has implications for the degree of authenticity ascribed to a text. Rosenfeld's categories include "the victims, the survivors, the survivors-who-become-victims" (a reference to Celan), as well as the "kinds-of-survivors, those who were never there but know more than the outlines of the place" (19) -- presumably people like Beckett. For Ezrahi the distinction is between survivors and "those who had been remote from the events themselves" (22), for [James E. Young] between "survivors," "non-victims," and "other writers" (68). Though they may be necessary for the construction of certain arguments, the difficulty of creating workable cognitive categories is obvious. Any classification of writers of Holocaust literature, however, that includes Sachs among the victims but excludes Weiss discredits itself.
The Investigation's perceived ideological bias seems to be, at least for Rosenfeld and Young, its most unacceptable transgression. Under the no-holds-barred chapter heading "Exploiting Atrocity" Rosenfeld indicts Weiss for "misappropriating" and "misusing" the suffering of others; Weiss "shapes" and on occasion "misshapes" facts in order to serve "a specific ideological vision of history" (154). The latter is cold-war code for Marxism and communism. Young refers more directly to Weiss's "Marxist credo" (78) in his stated goal of exploring the playwright's "Marxist grasp of events" (65). How and when the dramatist came by such a Marxist grasp and what it might consist of is not explored. Notwithstanding the fact that up to 1964 Weiss had given no indication that he was about to become a Marxist, that he did not join the Swedish (Euro-)Communist Party until 1968 and that there is very little evidence of his ever having acquired any extensive theoretical knowledge of Marxism, he had nothing near a "Marxist grasp" of Auschwitz. Young's assumption stands the chronology on its head. It was not Weiss's Marxism that produced The Investigation but rather Weiss's work on the Auschwitz material that intensified his interest in Marxism. In the play he seems to have used some basic Marxist concepts in a similar way he used [Dante]'s poem: as a kind of grid around which to shape the material aesthetically as much as conceptually. This aspect is far from clear and deserves further exploration. Weiss's turn toward Marxism also needs to be looked at within its historical context. There was in the early and mid-1960s a general trend among restive intellectuals toward a transformation of the Adenauer era of political restoration and cultural stagnation. At the core of this project was the reconstruction of Marxism as a theory which might provide some understanding of Auschwitz and of the Nazi period without being itself tainted by it.
|
