The Demolition of a Man: Autobiographies

Abstract

There is now more than half a century of writing about the Holocaust, of which life-writing forms a substantial part, from Primo Levi’s If This is a Man originally published in 1947 (2000) to the memoirs of the children of survivors such as Anne Karpf’s The War After (1996). There are people’s diaries written during the events themselves, as well as autobiographical accounts written afterwards. There are men and women’s perspectives as victims, survivors, perpetrators, bystanders, witnesses and rescuers of different religious and national identities. Conventional media studies scholars would not usually include an analysis of the genre of autobiography as part of a study of representations of the past, leaving this instead to the those within the fields of literature or history. But, I would suggest, a less orthodox and restricted approach is required here in order to understand the complex constellations of cultural mediations that construct social memories over time, especially since survivors’ life-writings constitute a key element in handing down the events of what happened, as evidenced by the development of young people’s socially inherited memories of the Holocaust (Interviews and Focus Groups, USA, April 1999; Poland, April 1998; Britain, 1998, 2000). Life-writing as a medium for communicating the past is also at the interstices between the individual and the social or public domain.

‘Me, a man, crying’ (Viktor C, cited by Langer, 1998:362)

‘Black milk came out of my breast.’ (Fanya Gottesfeld Heller, 1993:275)