Suchergebnisse

The perspectives of Paul Celan, Primo Levi, & Sarah Kofman, all of whom experienced the Holocaust & later committed suicide, are used to describe the relationship between silence, voice, & representation on the theme of the Holocaust. Celan contended that language fails humans in understanding the Holocaust, although language itself survived, & was marked by the event. His poetry speaks to a possible relation to an Other. For Levi, the you that listens to stories of the Holocaust is silent & carries the potential of refusing to grant meaning to words. Those who experienced the Holocaust, the utter witnesses, have been annihilated, so the survivors can only try to write from their falling silent, even if it means speaking in the names of the annihilated. Kofman felt that it was impossible to narrate a true history of Auschwitz, because the narrator is absent. The duty remains to speak & write, but to write at the thresholds of language, places of difference between silence & voice. M. Pflum