The future of the Holocaust: Storytelling, oppression, and identity; See under: "apocalypse"

THIS PAPER WAS CONCEIVED WITHIN A NARRATIVE FRAME that I will call the "peace process." It is being delivered in another frame, one so unstable that we haven't yet agreed on a name for it. The following is my own contribution to the search for a rubric that can contain this new reality. When first approached to speak at this symposium, I had intended to focus on David Grossman's role in helping to redefine "Europe," under the sign of peace, from a landscape of cataclysmic death into an increasingly detailed map to latent realms of memory and imagination. For Jews everywhere, this meant not only rehabilitation, but reclamation of points of access to lost cultures; for Israeli Jews, the peace process is--or was--an ambiance of reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, between Israel and the Arab world, that mandated working through and facing down the haunting traces of collective trauma. The moral discourse that evolved in Israeli culture after Sabra and Chatilla and culminated during the (first) Intif ada shifted from the language of martyrdom and siege to a self-critical probing of the implications of traumatic imprinting for the exercise of political sovereignty. The trauerarbe it, the work of mourning, that characterized Israel of the late 1980s and '90s was enacted in the theater of war as well as in the theater of make-believe. (1)

What we SAW under love, under the sign of love, what became visible once again, was Boiberik and Chodorov as well as concentration camps and white rooms, the Children of the Heart and Motti the Cantor's Son as well as the Sondercommando and Herr Neigel, pojomkes--or yagedes, depending on your dialect--as well as gas chambers and secret blue codes on wrinkled arms.

We find ourselves today at a crossroads between the theater of war with its clumsy gropings towards peace, and the desperate seductions of the Endgame--what Karl Kraus called, in an analogous context, "The Last Days of Mankind."(2) "Europe" reemerges here as the backdrop of desolation and ruin, as the primary modem reference for the ongoing enactment of Israel's rendezvous with Destiny. The doomsday scenario crosses political lines: whether one embraces it as part of a grand redemptive scheme or capitulates to it out of despair, apocalypse offers confirmation of one of the most fundamental archetypes of Jewish collective consciousness.

I could of course go on. That's what I would have talked about. In light of the events of recent months, however, I am compelled to shift the emphasis to explore the representation in Israeli literature and theater of a fundamental fluctuation between the paradigms of "war" and "apocalypse," or "war" and "Holocaust."

Let me begin with a set of disclaimers. By speaking of a choice between "war" and "apocalypse," I am not offering a celebration of one form of death above another or attempting to qualify by dignifying one form of suffering over another.(3) I am frying to evaluate the constitutive weight of death on the battlefield and death in extermination camps as it informs the existential alternatives being redrawn in Israel today. I realize that the argument that war is a constitutive force brings me dangerously close to the thinking of Carl Schmitt and other philosophers that fed the political philosophies of the Third Reich. I am also aware of the artificial line I am trying to hold between war and "total war." As the work of Omer Bartov, Jay Winter, and others has emphasized, in the context of modem warfare, there may be but a bureaucratic step from armed combat to mass deportation and murder, "final solutions," ethnic cleansing--for which the rhetoric, like the beast slouching toward Bethlehem, is always already the re.(4) The distinction I am drawing is in the cultural representations of the means, the context, the players, and the narrative of violent confrontation. It is not war as a form of violence that I am embracing, but rather the definition of contested arenas as a battlefield for an array of equal claims-if not necessarily equal forces, rather than as a contaminated area to be "sterilized," or a contest between the forces of light and darkness. The "war process," like the peace process, is currency traded in the marketplace of competing interests, based on mutual recognition and a presumptive balance of rights and power.

But consider, first, the paradigm of apocalypse. Israel as idea and as reality has tottered between galvanizing myths of utopia and dystopia, the language of cosmic destruction and redemption, on the one hand, and the language of history and fictions of the quotidian, sovereign self, on the other. To the extent that the Israeli imagination was governed by a dramatic birth narrative, utopian craving for severance from the insufferable past and coherence as a futurist aesthetic, Europe was the matrix of that hunger. And whereas other places of origin like Iraq or Egypt, North America or North Africa, are a growing geniza of private and intergenerational memory, the Holocaust as chronotope (the time-space of Europe under the sign of National Socialism) and Europe as graveyard were (and continue to be) a kind of "confirmation" of the Zionist reading of Jewish history. Even as attempts were made to send "Jewish brigades" to fight Nazi Germany, and exaggerated attention was paid to forms of resistance in the ghetto s and camps, the aesthetic appeal of total destruction as a terrible invitation to "start over" was the most forceful determinant of the early postwar dialectic. Those survivors who arrived in Palestine were referred to as "she'erit ha-pleta," the "surviving remnant," leftovers from some failed project. As prototype of total extermination, the Shoah acts as perfect corollary or prelude to the totalizing discourse of Zionism. It returns in these frightful times as a template of the future that would justify the most intransigent and desperate acts. When in the political realm the apocalypticists of today say "ein lanu partnerim, "we have no partners (for the peace process), what they are saying in the existential realm is, "we don't see in them a reflection of our own humanity." Or: there is no room in this mirror for more than one reflection.