Probing the Limits of Representation

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NAZISM AND THE "FINAL SOLUTION"

Edited by Saul Friedlander

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

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History beyond the Pleasure Principle:

Some Thoughts on the Representation of Trauma

ERIC L. SANTNER

•. I find it increasingly difficult to reflect on the theoretical and ethical .• limits to historical and artistic representations of Nazism and the "Final Solution" without also thinking about recent events in Central Europe and, above all, about the unification of the two Germanys. If the stories one tells about the past (and, more specifical1y, about how one came to be who one is or thinks one is) are at some level determined

by the present social, psychological, and political needs of the teller and his or her audience, then the radical developments that have taken place in Europe over the last several years cannot help but powerfully influence the repertoire of available representations of the events and phenomena that are our concern here. You will recall Elie Wiesel's concerns regarding the place of a particular date, 9 November, in the historical imagination of contemporary German society. 1 The date of the Kristallnacht as well as of the first breach in the Berlin Wall, fiftyone years later, had apparently become a site of struggle between competing narratives.s The story of the destruction of European Jewry, which entered a new stage with the Kristallnacht pogroms, was being displaced-or at least this was Wiesel's worry-by a rather different narrative, the story of the German struggle against, and ultimate triumph over, Marxism-Leninism. In a sense, Wiesel's question was this: Would the shattered glass of 1938 he buried and, as it were, metamorphosed under the sheer weight of all that crumbling concrete of November 1989?

Those familiar with the West German political and cultural scene of the 1970s and 1980s will recognize in the struggle over the narrative inscription of this particular date the contours of a process that has increasingly come to occupy the German historical imagination and POlitical unconscious over the last decade or so." This process might be

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described as a series of mnemonic readjustments and rearrangements, enacted in the framework of public rituals, narratives, and various other modes of cultural production, whereby dates, events, names, concepts, locations, institutions, and historical agents are made newly available for libidinal investments."

The most notorious public ritual in this regard was, perhaps, the ceremony of reconciliation staged at Bitburg in May 1985, the subtext of which seemed to involve not only the sentimental equalization of all victims of the war but, more insidiously, a repositioning of the SS within a narrative of the long "Western" struggle against Bolshevism.

In the course of the following two years, this general tendency and direction of mnemonic readjustment became the central issue in the Historikerstreit, a discursive event which has not ceased to have r~· percussions for the way one thinks about recent German history and, perhaps more important, the way one thinks about the ambiguous and often dubious role of the historian in the process of national identity formation. The details of this debate are well known and I will not rehearse them again here. I would simply like to note how a certain "narrative fetishism" has figured in this controversy.

By narrative fetishism I mean the construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously designed to expunge the traces c of the trauma or loss that called that narrative into being in the first place. The use of narrative as fetish may be contrasted with that rather different mode of symbolic behavior that Freud called Trauerarbeit or the "work of mourning." Both narrative fetishism and mourning are responses to loss, to a past that refuses to go away due to its traumatic impact. The work of mourning is a process of elaborating and integrating the reality of loss or traumatic shock by remembering and repeat- , ing it in symbolically and dialogically mediated doses; it is a process of translating, troping, and figuring loss and, as Dominick LaCapra has noted in his chapter, may encompass "a relation between language and" ' silence that is in some sense rituahzed.?" Narrative fetishism, by contrast, is the wayan inability or refusal to mourn emplots traumatic' events; it is a strategy of undoing, in fantasy, the need for mourning by' simulating a condition of intactness, typically by situating the site and .. , origin ofloss elsewhere. Narrative fetishism releases one from the burden of having to reconstitute one's self-Identity under "posttraumatic conditions; in narrative fetishism, the "post" is indefinitely postponed.i

Here, of course, it might be said that it is unrealistic and may per- •

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haps even represent a sort of category mistake to expect that historiography could or should perform Trauerarbeit. Historians, after all strive for intellectual and not psychic mastery of events. In this context I would recall LaCapra's deconstruction of this opposition between in. tellectual and psychic mastery, cognitive and affective dimensions of representation, "scientific" and "mythic" or "ritualized" approaches to the past. 6 As LaCapra's reading of the historians' debate suggests, one might argue that because of the kinds and intensities of transferential dynamics it calls forth, a traumatic event is by definition one that implicates the historian in labors of psychic mastery. Any historical account of such an event will, in other words, include, explicitly or implicitly, an elaboration of what might be called the historian's own context of survivorship. Such an elaboration wi1l typically involve ef. forts to differentiate and distance one's own moral, political, and psychological dispositions from those associated with the traumatic event. The affect, style, and velocity with which this work of differentiation is undertaken is often an indication of the intensity of the transferential relations that continue to bind one to the trauma. The transferential dynamic will, moreover, vary radically according to the features of the particular context of survivorship or, to cite LaCapra once more, according to the particular subject position of the historian. The transferential relations of a non-jewish German historian to Nazism and the Final Solution will differ enormously from those of an Israeli historian to the same events. And certainly not only the national and cultural background but also the age of the historian, his or her temporal distance to the events in question, will playa Significant role in the definition of the subject position. 7 But central to any elaboration of survivorship is, I would argue, the work of mourning. As should be clear by now, my primary concern in the present context is with the tasks and burdens of mourning that continue to affiict and, as it were, interrupt processes of identity formation in postwar Germany. In other words, I am concerned here with the project and dilemma of elaborating a postHolocaust German national and cultural identity. Germans are faced with the paradoxical task of having to constitute their "Cermanness" in the awareness of the horrors generated by a previous production of national and·cultural identity. 8

, Perhaps Freud's most compelling characterization of the work of !' mourning is his discussion, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of the fort/da game that he had observed in the behavior of his one-and-a-

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half-year-old grandson. In this game the child is seen to master his, grief over separation from the mother by staging his own performance .'. of disappearance and return with props that D. W Winnicott would . call transitional objects. Bereft by the mother's absence, and more generally by the dawning awareness that the interval between himself; and his mother opens up a whole range of unpredictable and poten- ... tially treacherous possibilities, he reenacts the opening of that abysmal" interval within the controlled space of a primitive ritual. The child is·! translating, as it were, his fragmented narcissism (which might other- . wise pose a psychotic risk-the risk of psychological disintegration) into the formalized rhythms of symbolic behavior, thanks to this pro-. cedure, he is able to administer in controlled doses the absence he is mourning. The capacity to dose out and to represent absence by means' of substitutive figures at a remove from what one might call their "tran- .. scendental signifier," is what allows the child to avoid psychotic breakdown and transform his lost sense of omnipotence into a ... form of empowerment. The work of mourning performed in the forti· da game has attracted so much attention in recent literary and critical theory because it displays so clearly the way in which a human self •. constitutes itself out of the ruins of its narcissism. 9

The dosing out of a certain negative-a thanatotic-element as strategy of mastering a real and traumatic loss is a fundamentally meopathic procedure. In a homeopathic procedure the controlled troduction of a negative element-a symbolic or, in medical UJI.Ut;::.IHlI. real poison-helps to heal a system infected by a similar },VII"UI'VU"<, substance. The poison becomes a cure by empowering the individual to master the potentially traumatic effects of large doses of the morphologically related poison.w In the [ortlda game it is the rn1.,rmnll" manipulation of signifiers and figures, objects and syllables an absence, that serves as the poison that cures. These signiflers are controlled symbolic doses of absence and renunciation that help the: child to survive and (ideally) be empowered by the negativity of

mother's absence. ' .

To put these matters in a somewhat different light, one might that the work of mourning is the way human beings restore the ofthe pleasure principle in the wake of trauma or loss. I cal1 your tion to Freud's remarks in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, shortly lowing his discussion of the forti do game, regarding the behavior Unfallsneurotiker, individuals who have experienced and then

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pressed some trauma but return to it over and over again in their dreams. Concerning this oneiric repetition compulsion, Freud says . the following:

We may assume . . . that dreams are here helping to carry out another task, which must be accomplished before the dominance of the pleasure principle can even begin. These dreams are endeavouring to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis. They thus afford us a view of a function of the mental apparatus which, though it does not contradict the pleasure principle, is nevertheless independent of it and seems to be more primitive than the purpose of gaining pleasure and avoiding unpleasure.!'

I'·

··Given the homologies Freud underlined between the symptoms of the

victim and the symbolic behavior of the child at play, one may o,;VI.lo,;U'UC that these other, more primitive psychic tasks are the tasks of t;mli)Urmrlg that serve to constitute the selfand that must, at some level, : be reiterated with al1 later experiences of loss or traumatic shock (Freud was thinking here of the great number of traumatized soldiers . from World War I). 12 Both the child trying to master his

separateness from the mother and the trauma victim returning, in to the site of shock are locked in a repetition compulsion: an to recuperate, in the controlled context of symbolic behavior, the or readiness to feel anxiety, absent during the initial or loss. It was Freud's thought that the absence of appropriate than loss per se is what leads to traumatizaUntil such anxiety has been recuperated and worked through,

loss will continue to represent a past that refuses to go away. At the of this process of psychic mastery, the ego becomes, as Freud says "free and uninhibited" and open to new libidinal investthat is, open to object relations under the regime of the plea-

principle. Fetishism, as I am using the term here, is, by contrast,

. strategy whereby one seeks voluntaristically to reinstate the pleasure without addressing and working through those other tasks as Freud insists, "must be accomplished before the dominance the pleasure principle can even begin." Far from providing a symspace for the recuperation of anxiety, narrative fetishism directly indirectly offers reassurances that there was no need for anxiety in . first place.

.• ,When Ernst Nolte asks-to return now to the context of the his tor-

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ians' debate-whether it is "not likely that the Nazis and Hitler committed this 'Asiatic' deed [the "Final Solution"] because they saw themselves and others like them as potential or real victims of an 'Asiatic' deed [the gulag],"13 he is, so to speak, inviting his readers to locate themselves in a place-call it simply somewhere to the west of Asia-where they can feel morally and psychologically unthreatened by the traumas and losses-what I am calling the psychotic risk-signified by Nazism and the "Final Solution." According to Nolte, in this magical zone to the west of Asia, the regime of the pleasure principle was never ill any danger,

A similar fetishistic use of narrative may be found. I think, in other contributions to the historians' debate. In his Zweierlei Untergang, for example, Andreas Hillgruber more or less programmatically sets out to restore his German audience's capacity libidinally to cathect and unproblematically to identify with the defenders of Germany's eastern territories during the period of their collapse, even though these "valiant" efforts to hold back the anticipated reprisals of the Red Army-:efforts evoked with considerable narrative pleasure-allowed for the machinery of the death camps to continue unabated.!' As Saul Friedlander has noted of Hillgruber's fetishistic reinscription of the Wehrmacht and the events of 1944-45:

In the new representation, the Wehrmacht becomes the heroic defender of the victims threatened by the Soviet onslaught. The crimes

of the Wehrmacht are not denied by Hillgruber, although he prefers

to speak of the "revenge orgy" of the Red Army. Whereas this revenge orgy is described with considerable pathos. , , its origin, the tens of millions of dead left by the Wehrmacht in the wake of its onslaughts on Germany's neighbors-particularly on the Soviet Union-does not seem to reenter the picture with any forceful- . ness. IS

But even in morally and historiographically far more responsible efw: forts to historicize Nazism and the "Final Solution," one may discover an inclination to reinvoke prematurely a condition of normalcy, that . a condition in which the normal functioning of the pleasure pnncmie has not been significantly disrupted and exposed to psychotic risk.

Arguing his case several years ago for more vigorous, plastic, .

richly colored narrative strategies. of historicizing National Socialism, Martin Broszat bemoaned the fact that when historians turn to period of history their capacity for empathic interpretation and what

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he called the "pleasure in historical narration" [die Lust am geschichtlichen Erziihlen] appears to be blocked.w Broszat's plea for historicization was thus, among other things, a plea for a certain primacy of the pleasure principle in historical' narration even, paradoxically, when it comes to narrating events the traumatic impact of which would seem to call the normal functioning of that principle into question. Friedlander's critique of Broszat's appeal to narrative pleasure will be familiar to those who have folIowed the theoretical debates On the problem of representation with regard to Nazism and the "Final Solution." The gist of this critique, as I understand it, is the claim that the events in question-Nazism and the "Final Solution" -mark a shattering of the regime of normal social and psychological functioning and therewith a crossing over in to a realm of psychotic experience that may be inaccessible to empathic interpretation, that may not be redeemable within an economy of narrative pleasure, 17

Finally, I would like to discuss very briefly the dynamics of narrative fetishism as it functions in a realm of cultural production where narrative and visual pleasure freely intermingle, namely film. is I take my example from Edgar Reitz's hugely successful film Heimat, which was first broadcast on German television in the fall of 1984. (Reitz is currently involved in the postproduction of a sequel to Heimat.) This film is important for all kinds of reasons I cannot go into here. 19 In the present context, however, it is especially interesting to note that one of the effects of the film-whether this was intentional one can only sur... mise-has been to make the word "Heimat" newly available for libidi-

. nal investment in Germany, if only as the elegiac token of something .• lost. Not unlike the case of a particular date discussed earlier, the word .. "Heimat" becomes, in and through Reitz's film, a site of competing ,narratives. A word-one might say a "mytheme"-that has figured prominent ly in the s tory of the social marginalization and eventual de-

,~truction of European Jewry, is, as it were, reoccupied within a new '. ideological and narrative ensemble in which Germans can see and

. themselves as bereft victim, as the dispossessed.

This reoccupation of"Heimat" takes on further resonance when One that Reitz made his as a kind of counterfilm to the American production Holocaust. His own film was intended, in large as a strategy of reclaiming memories-and, perhaps more importhe pleasure in their narration-that Germans have been forced renounce under the sway of the American culture industry in gen-

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eral and media events like Holocaust in particular. (Reitz polemically refers to the aesthetics embodied by Holocaust as the "real terror" of the twentieth century.P" Germans have, Reitz claims, abandoned their unique, regionally inflected experiences and memories, because they have been morally terrorized by spectacles like Holocaust. fl.l Reitz's own work of resistance to this "terror" therefore lies in the salvaging of local experience, local history, local memories:

There are thousands of stories among our people that are worth being filmed, that are based on irritatingly detailed experi.ences which apparently do not contribute to judging or explaining history, but whose sum total would actually fill this gap. We mustn't let ourselves be prevented from taking our personal lives seriously ... Authors allover the world are trying to take possession of their own history and therewith of the history of the group to which they b~long. But they often find that their own history is torn out of the~r hands. The most serious act of expropriation occurs when a person IS deprived of his or her own history. With Holocaust, the Americans have taken away our history. 22

With Heimat, the pleasure in the historical narration of twentieth- .. century German history is taken back and reinstated with a vengeance .. But as numerous critics have noted, Reitz's restoration of narrative and, visual pleasure would seem to proceed along the route of the fetish, that is, at the price of disavowing the trauma signified by the "Final:

Solution." Here it is important to keep in mind that one can acknowledge the fact of an event, that is, that it happened, and yet continue to disavow the traumatizing impact of the same event.

The scene that perhaps best illustrates the fetishistic aspect Reitz's particular deployment of narrative and visual pleasure comes in the first episode of the film. This scene prefigures, quite remarkably,. the scenario evoked by Elie Wiesel regarding November 9. It is 1923; Eduard and Pauline make an afternoon excursion to Simmern, the largest town near Schabbach. Pauline wanders off alone and finds selflooking at the window display of the town watchmaker and '''''''1":1<::.1.'· Suddenly a group of young men run up behind her-including

uard armed as usual with camera and tripod-and begin thr1"lWlm!'· rocks at the window of the apartment above the watchmaker's where, as we learn, a Jew-in this case also branded as a resides. They are chased off by police, but the shards of fallen have cut Pauline's hand. Robert Krober, the watchmaker, signals

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to come into the shop where he cleans her wound, thereby initiating the love story ofPauJine and Robert. Later On in the film-it is 1933- we hear that the now married Pauline and Robert are buying the Jew's apartment. As Robert remarks, "The house belongs to him and now he

, wants to sell it ... The Jews don't have it so easy anymore."

This small Kristallnacht sequence shows how the shards of the Jew's shattered existence-we never see him in the flesh-are immediately absorbed into a sentimental story of love and courtship in the provinces. Though it is the filmmaker who alerts us to the ways in which ~ experience (and narrative) construct themselves around such blind ~ spots, Reitz refuses to allow such potentially traumatic moments to ~ disrupt the economy of narrative and visual pleasure maintained ~ throughout his fifteen and a half hours of film. This consistency is

surely one of the reasons for the incredible SUccess of the film. Heimat ~

· offers its viewers the opportunity to witness a chronicle of twentieth- I'. century German history in which die Lust am geschichtlichen Erziih- ~

len is never in any serious danger. ::-_

· I have argued in these pages that Nazism and the "Final Solution" need to be theorized under the sign of massive trauma, meaning that these events must be confronted and analyzed in their capacity to endanger and overwhelm the composition and coherence of individual ',and collective identities that enter into their deadly field offorce. To , .. use, once more, metaphors suggested by Freud's discussion of trau.manc neurosis, the events in question may represent for those whose : lives have been touched by them, even across the distance of one or more generations, a degree of overstimulation to psychic structures and economies such that normal psychic functioning (under the aus·pices of the pleasure principle) may be interrupted and other, more

· "primitive" tasks may take precedence. These are the tasks of repairing what Freud referred to as the Beizschutz, the protective shield or skin that normally regulates the flow of stimuli and information the boundaries of the self. To quote, once more, from Beyond

Pleasure Principle, Freud's most ambitious effort to formulate a of trauma:

-, ..

--

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: We describe as "traumatic" any excitations from outside which are .' powerful enough to break through the protective shield [Reiz. It seems to me that the concept of trauma necessarily ima connection of this kind with a breach in an otherwise efficabarrier against stimuli. Such an event as an external trauma is

'- ~<'

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-c 152 > bound to provoke a disturbance on a large scale in the functioning of the organism's energy and to set in motion every possible defense measure. At the same time, the pleasure principle is for the moment put out of action. There is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another problem arises instead-the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and of binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can then be disposed Of.23

Here it is most important to keep in mind the textual quality of this

Reizschutz, to remember that it is made from symbolic materials, that it is a culturally constructed and maintained organization of individual and group identities. As Robert Lifton has put it, "In the case of severe trauma we can say that there has been an important break in the lifeline that can leave one permanently engaged in either repair or the acquisition of new twine. And here we come to the survivor's overall task, that of formulation, evolving new inner forms that include the

traumatic event."lW

Both mourning and narrative fetishism as I have defined these terms

are strategies whereby groups and individuals reconstruct their vitality and identity in the wake of trauma. The crucial difference between the two modes of repair has to do with the willingness or capacity to include the traumatic event in one's efforts to reformulate and reconsti-

tute identity.

There are a number of paths along which such an integration might

proceed. Important aspects of this work have, I would argue, figured prominently in theoretical discourses of recent years-call them" postmodem" -that have concerned themselves with the cultural construction and deployment of "difference" in particular historical contexts. These discourses have invited the citizens of Western industrial and postindustrial societies to acknowledge and work through fundamental complicities between certain modes of identity formation and the violence and destruction perpetrated in emblematic fashion by German fascism against Jews and other groups deemed to be threatening to the' composition and coherence of the German subject.~ Feminist cri-' tiques, in particular, of the patriarchal subject and its various historical institutions suggest that the tasks facing post-Holocaust societies in general, that is, societies willing to work through the traumatic impact of Nazism and the "Final Solution," include that of a radical rethinking and reformulation of the very notions of boundaries and borderlines,

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of that "protective shield" regulating exchange between the inside and _

~he outside .of individuals and groups. The goal of such reformulations - .....

IS, as I see It, the development of a capacity to constitute boundaries -~

that can cr~at~ a dynamic space of mutual recognition (between self --and other, indigenous and foreign); in the absence of such a capacity it would seem that one is condemned to produce only rigid fortifications that can secure little more than the inert space of a thoroughly homogeneous and ultimately paranoid "Heimat."26 TO,summarize: To take seriously Nazism and the "Final Solution" as massl~e trauma means to shift one's theoretical, ethical, and political ~tten~l~n to the psychic and social sites where individual and group Idenh~les .are constituted, destroyed, and reconstructed. This mode of attenho~ IS One which, to paraphrase Freud, though it may not always cont~adlct the pleasure principle, is nevertheless independent of it and IS. addressed to issues that are more primitive than the purpose, ~arratJve or otherwise, of gaining pleasure and avoiding unpleasure. It IS furthermore a mode of attention that requires a capacity and willingness to work through anxiety. Let me conclude by returning very briefly to the possible influence of contemporary political events On the ways that Nazism and the "F'nal Solution" may come to be represented both in popular and more properly scientific historiographical discourses. There are signs that the narratives being constructed around the collapse of Central and Eastern European communism and the unification of the two Germanys will. have a ten?e~cy to reduce the available moral. conceptual, and psychic space within which Nazism and its crimes can still be worked through as a trauma that shook the West at its very foundations. All around one hears stories oftriumph: of a vital and dynamic Western economic and political culture over a moribund socialism somehow considered to be "Eastern," not to say 'J\.siatic." At some level it is as if events in Europe had opened the gates to ever more unconllicted "en.. actments" of the revisionist narratives constructed by Nolte and Hill· gr~~er in the mid-eighties. It is difficult not to get the sense that the .•. cnsis of s~~iali.s~ is. bei~g ap~ropriated at the level of what might be · called.the political Imaginary to exorcize from the body of the West... from ItS patterns and projects of modernization-the violence de· struction, and human suffering that have belonged to and continue to ; bel?ng to. its ~istory. In Germany. the velocity, affect, and style with

'. which unification has been undertaken suggest a manic element, not

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unlike that which typified the work of reconstruction in the early postwar years. This manic element has attached itself, as earlier, to images and ideals of economic, technological, and bureaucratic mastery.

In a political and cultural climate in which the operative metaphor has been that of a powerful machine moving relentlessly forward-the image of a train which has left the station and cannot be halted Or slowed down has strangely, uncannily, come to dominate the public discourse on unffication-e-there is, perhaps, little reason to be hopeful that this crucial period of national reconstitution might become a real opportunity for reflection: not only on the issues associated with the breakdown of state socialism, which are indeed formidable, but also on a wide range of moral, political. and psychological questions that have not ceased to emanate from the traumas of Nazism and the "Final Solution."