ISSN 1479\u20137585 print/1740\u20131666 online/05/010069\u201317
\u00a9 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1479758042000331943

The article deals with the \u201criddle\u201d of testimony in the context of Auschwitz. Trying to move beyond the reliance on \u201cexperience\u201d on the one hand and the danger of \u201ctrivializing\u201d the Holocaust on the other, we focus on the intermediary space in between the two approaches to the Holocaust, and discuss the possibil- ity of an ethics that takes point of departure in Muselmann\u2019s naked body. In this context we read Giorgio Agamben\u2019s Remnants of Auschwitz and Roberto Benigni\u2019s Life is Beautiful together to render visible the (im)possibilities of representing the \u201cunspeakable\u201d. The Holocaust is that which resists archivation for it escapes both the appropriating memory and the willed forgetting. But then, how can we keep alive the aporia, the tension between speech and naked life, between the traumatized testimony and the appropriating forgetfulness, and thus \u201cmediate\u201d between the past and the present? How can one represent the impossibility of depicting horror? We argue that the Holocaust cannot be repre- sented in its horror and all its essence for this essence precisely consists in making testimony impossible. The horror of the camp can be depicted only indi- rectly. \u201cThe spirit of Auschwitz\u201d is thus neither incarnated in those who died of gassing nor in those who survived, but in the bond that exists between them. We are all descendants of Auschwitz, and we are all obliged to bear testimony.

Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full. (Trotsky, 1940, shortly before he was killed by Stalin; quoted in Viano 1999, p. 47)

Who can bear testimony to Auschwitz, given that its \u201ctrue\u201d witnesses died in gas chambers (Lyotard 1988, p. 3)? Herein lays the revisionists\u2019 most serious trump: there is nobody who canprove that he or she died there. But do we not have survivors, testimonies, museums and miles of literature on the Holocaust? Why, then, take the problem of testimony and of revisionism seriously? Because it is a symptom of a more fundamental problem: how are we to preserve the status of the Holocaust as a unique and living memory? Is it to be inscribed in the history books as one chapter among others or is to be understood as a singular and trau- matic event beyond comprehension?

The will to preserve the living memory of the Holocaust principally relies on testimonies. Despite being \u201conly\u201d second-hand witnesses to the gas chambers, the survivors may through their unsuccessful attempts to depict the horror of camps bear testimony to this very incomprehensibility. This \u201cpuritan\u201d strategy however suffers from the fact that the Holocaust generation will not be with us very long, that is, and in the absence of living memory we will soon have to be content with history. In this situation the problem of Holocaust denial revamp which might be the reason for the ever-increasing quantity of Holocaust-related cultural production. Indeed, if historically it is denied and pushed aside, the Holocaust is, today, if anything, an overexposed topic.

We are here confronted with two equally unsatisfactory alternatives. The first consists of accepting the Holocaust as the ultimate mystery that cannot be represented for it is rooted in the survivors\u2019 experience. Thus many attempts at demystification are perceived as the negation of the unique in the catastrophe, and this, of course, makes a critical reflection on the Holocaust difficult (whi

between the imperative to let the events (or the survivors) speak for them- selves and the de-personalizing silencing produced by The Third Reich (Trezise 2001, p. 51). The other alternative is to abandon the Holocaust to history; to see it as just one of many genocide incidents. However, to explain the Holo- caust in this way is to normalize it, that is, to forget that the Holocaust has enabled the West to develop a critical self-consciousness and a moral and political will to resist evil.

Refusing these two strategies, Agamben investigates the possibility of a third, in which the Holocaust is neither elevated to a mystery that escapes representation nor reduced to an object that can be exhausted by under- standing (Agamben 1999, p. 13). For Agamben, Auschwitz materializes the aporia of historical knowledge: that facts and truth, verification and under- standing can never coincide (Agamben 1999, p. 12). In as much as \u201caporia\u201d refers to a tension without which ethics, memory and the political cannot exist, the aporia of the Holocaust consists of bearing testimony to something, which is impossible to bear testimony to. Remembrance is impossible but imperative (Agamben 1999, p. 13).

Agamben\u2019s work on Auschwitz, Remnants of Auschwitz, is an interesting inter- vention into the philosophical debate on the Holocaust. Equally interesting is the more popular discussion of the Holocaust in Benigni and Cerami\u2019s film Life is

between these two discussions, allowing them to fertilize each other. This increases the stakes in relation to both discourses. Thus, the ethical problema- tique of Remnants of Auschwitz opens up an interesting line of interpretation regarding Life is Beautiful, while, in turn, this interpretation becomes a test for its own ethical strength. Indeed, Life is Beautiful sets up the problem of remem- brance more radically, focusing not \u201conly\u201d on the survivors\u2019 testimony but also on post-remembrance as practiced by the postwar generation. We start with a short summary of the film and then move to a more abstract reflection on the

character of the Holocaust as memory. In this, we deal with the question of how we, the postwar generations, might relate to the memory of the camps in an ethical way. Or, in a nutshell, how is postremembrance possible?

The film plunges headlong with Guido\u2019s (played by Benigni himself) entrance. Together with his friend Ferruccio (played by Sirgio Bini Bustric) he is in his car on the way to a Tuscanian village. Down the hill they discover that the brakes do not work. At full speed they approach the cheerfully decorated town expecting the King\u2019s visit. Without brakes, Guido and Ferrucio overtake the King. When they approach the festive gathering, Guido feverishly moves his arms to warn the gathering who, misunderstanding the gesture, ecstatically address Guido with a \u201cHeil Hitler\u201d, which was originally prepared for the King. Herewith, the leitmotif of the movie is disclosed: the Jew Guido drifts towards an unavoidable catastro- phe. To be sure, Guido can avoid the barriers on his way but the course (towards the final solution) is not possible to change. The Nazi will become his fate.

The opening scene, however, ends rather pleasantly in a farm outside the city, where the charming Dora (played by Nicoletta Braschi) literally falls in Guido\u2019s arms, as if she were sent from heaven. From this moment Guido is obsessed with the desire to win her heart. To do this he employs some comic tricks all working according to a logic of a Schopenhauerian will. Schopenhauer is mentioned for the first time just before Guido and Ferruccio, who have arrived the city and got a double bed from their uncle, start calming down. Asked how it is to fall asleep so quickly, Guido says that Schopenhauer is the answer: \u201cI am what I want to be\u201d. Like a hypnotizer, he attempts to make Ferruccio fall asleep: \u201csleep, sleep, sleep \u2026\u201d he whispers, while he juggles with his toes over Ferruccio\u2019s head. Ferruccio says good night and falls asleep. Guido tries his technique a last time: \u201cwake up, wake up, wake up \u2026\u201d, and Ferruccio wakes up. Guido is adversely surprised by the effect of his trick.

Guido needs his ability for humour and his Schopenhauerian tricks because Dora\u2019s object of choice is no less than the local Party boss. Luckily for Guido, he becomes a servant at Dora\u2019s engagement party. The \u201ccheerful\u201d conversation around the table is about children\u2019s calculating abilities (Dora is a teacher in the local primary school). The head teacher refers to a task which she has come across in the teaching material: a mentally disabled person costs four marks a day, a crippled person four and a half, and an epileptic three and a half. Given that the average daily expenses are four marks and that there are 300,000 patients, how much money would the state then save by eliminating these people? One cannot demand such a difficult task from seven year olds, the head teacher bursts! They are, after all, not German children. Dora\u2019s future husband does not think the calculation is a difficult and quickly multiplies 300,000 with four. Dora herself is shocked by the dry indifference demonstrated by her future husband and the other guests. So when the chance arrives, she seeks contact