Dominic Williams

Figuring the Grey Zone: the Auschwitz Sonderkommando in contemporary culture

ABSTRACT This essay reads the ways in which the Auschwitz Sonderkommando figure in the film The Grey Zone (2001) and the comic book Magneto: Testament (2009). The almost archetypally traumatic experiences of the Sonderkommando have made them a difficult subject for many media. But in forms and genres which place great emphasis on character and plot it has actually made them a way to figure some of the key difficulties of trauma. This essay shows how the generic conventions of gangster films and superhero origin stories allow The Grey Zone and Magneto to address both the moral questions of the Sonderkommando’s position and the ways in which they are able to bear witness.

Introduction: Representing Auschwitz — At the Margins of Testimony

The Holocaust is frequently described in bounded terms. It is defined as an event possessing distinct existential, geographical and temporal borders. This explains why the barbed wire fences erected around concentration and extermination camps, fences that formed their physical boundary, have become a powerful trope for expressing boundaries of knowledge and understanding. The fence stands as a metaphor for limits to comprehension. Griselda Pollock adroitly illustrates the unbridgeable divide the fence has come to represent through her analysis of Margaret Bourke White’s photograph of ‘Survivors at Buchenwald, April 1945’. Pollock writes: ‘while they look at us, the spectators, the concentrationees are divided from us by a barbed wire fence that cuts horizontally across their vertically striped garb as a barely visible barrier that is, none the less, an absolute division. What these men have seen and what they will never cease to carry as images burned into hunger and pain-dulled minds, our sight of them from this side of that frontier cannot imagine’ (2007, p. 276). In this reading, the wire marks a limit point beyond which the minds of those not interned in the camps cannot journey in the sense that they cannot adequately conceive of the experiences endured by the inmates.

‘The Dead Are My Teachers’: The Scrolls of Auschwitz in Jerome Rothenberg’s Khurbn

As Dan Stone notes (this volume), the Scrolls of Auschwitz have received remarkably little attention from historians of the Holocaust. In addition to the limited number of discussions in the historiography, however, an extraordinary literary response to these documents can be found in Jerome Rothenberg’s long poem Khurbn (1989), two sections of which name authors of the Scrolls and quote some of their words directly. This essay argues that Rothenberg’s incorporation of the Scrolls into his own work brings to the fore aspects of these texts that historians have had much greater difficulty coming to terms with.

“NO HISTORY TO SPEAK OF”: JEWISHNESS AND MODERNISM IN JOHN RODKER'S MEMOIRS OF OTHER FRONTS (1932)

This study argues that an important part of the relationship between modernist literature and the modern Jewish experience can be understood through an examination of the novel Memoirs of Other Fronts (1932), written by John Rodker, but published anonymously. It shows that Rodker, who had been associated with major figures of Anglo-American modernism throughout the 1920s, was engaged in a complex and often painful negotiation of identity that was not a simple use of modernist techniques nor a straightforward acceptance of modernist imaginings of “the Jew”. Rodkers indirect means of writing about his own Jewishness was the product of a particular social location: not being fully part of mainstream British society, nor of any Jewish community, nor, indeed, part of mainstream modernism itself. Such a location caused him to produce an image of himself as foreign and estranged, but allowed him, through his use of psychoanalysis, to see this condition as true of everyone in the period, creating a powerful and compelling portrait of Britain during and after the Great War as traumatized, sadistic and commodified. However, by making everyone into “Jews”, the way in which the “Jewishness” of actual Jews was defined was left unquestioned.