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Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory Paperback – January 27, 1993

by Lawrence L. Langer (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 19 ratings
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  1. National Book Critics Circle AwardWinner, 1991
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Winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism
 
This important an original book is the first sustained analysis of the unique ways in which oral testimony of survivors contributes to our understanding of the Holocaust. It also sheds light on the forms and functions of memory as victims relive devastating experiences of pain, humiliation, and loss.
 
Drawing on the Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, Lawrence L. Langer shows how oral Holocaust testimonies complement historical studies by enabling us to confront the human dimensions of the catastrophe. Quoting extensively from these interviews, Langer develops a technique for interpreting them as we might a written text. He contrasts written and oral narratives, noting that while survivor memoirs by authors such as Primo Levi and Charlotte Delbo transform reality through style, imagery, chronology, or a coherent moral vision, oral testimonies resist these organizing impulses and allow instead a kind of unshielded truth to emerge, just as powerful in its impact as the visions taking shape in written memoirs. He argues that it is necessary to deromanticize the survival experience and that to burden it with accolades about the “indomitable human spirit” is to slight its painful complexity and ambivalence. Finally he explores the perplexing task of establishing a meaningful connection between consequential living and inconsequential dying, between moral striving and the sprit of anguish and sense of a diminished self that pervades these haunting Holocaust testimonies.
Previous page
  1. Print length
    216 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Yale University Press
  4. Publication date
    January 27, 1993
  5. Dimensions
    8.22 x 5.41 x 0.69 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0300052472
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0300052473
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Disturbing and controversial, this work is based on 300 of the more than 1,400 taped interviews with Holocaust survivors preserved at Yale University's Fortunoff Video Archives. It's disturbing because of the survivors' graphic retelling of the starvation, torture, brutalization and cannibalism that occurred in the Nazi death camps. It's controversial because, instead of focusing on the bravery necessary to endure such horrors, Langer's book delves into the psychic wounds that 50 years after their infliction remain unhealed. "We have these double lives," said one survivor. "We can't cancel out. It just won't go away." Holocaust Memories won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for 1991.

Review

This brilliant, scholarly book stares into the void; it eschews tributes to heroism and martyrdom, focusing instead on personal and societal wreckage caused by mass murder. -- Publishers Weekly

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Yale University Press; Reissue edition (January 27, 1993)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 216 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0300052472
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0300052473
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.2 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.22 x 5.41 x 0.69 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 19 ratings

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Lawrence L. Langer

Lawrence L. Langer

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Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
19 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Lou Gottlieb
5.0 out of 5 stars If you can't stand to have the experience of a Holocaust victim for even a fraction of a second,
Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2021
Verified Purchase
this book will let you skirt having the experience, but in such a way as to define that experience's borders.

No substitute for the actual experience, but at least you'll know what you're missing.

For the experience itself, read a single vignette of Charlotte Delbo's "Auschwitz and After", and let yourself become her for a moment. You'll learn more in that moment than reading a hundred testimonies would teach you. Then, you'll understand.
One person found this helpful
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international student
5.0 out of 5 stars Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory
Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2012
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Although difficult to read, as the author is very skilled in verbal communication, this book is a great benefit for me as a therapist. It is instructing me as to the impossibly difficult path that those who are abused and tortured continually over time have when they must live in a now "normal" world. I will need to read it several times. Thank you, Mr. Langer
3 people found this helpful
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Curtis Grindahl
5.0 out of 5 stars A Trauma Survivor's Take
Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2019
There is a reference to this book in "The Body Keeps the Score, Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma." I'm reading that book with the hope of making sense of a lifetime of dissociation overlaying terror I begin to appreciate as the product of complex trauma experienced from my earliest years. I would never suggest that what one little boy experienced compares with the horror of the Holocaust, but the exploration of memory in this book is remarkably comforting as I reflect on the struggle to simply be a human being when the underlying experience is terror, that I am unworthy, my caretaker untrustworthy and the world unsafe. There are no words for a one and two month old child to understand what is happening. Only the terror remains.

Interestingly, although I'm not Jewish, I've been a student of Judaism since I discovered while spending time in a quiet room at University that it was a library of Jewish studies. That launched me into an exploration of history and literature of the Jewish people, including study of World War II. Little did I expect then what i would later uncover about myself AND what I'd learn from Holocaust survivors in this deeply disturbing but surprisingly comforting book. All one can do is live life as best we can while carrying the unspeakable memories of what is blessedly in the past... even though it is not in the past.
5 people found this helpful
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Book Lover
5.0 out of 5 stars Most important read of your life
Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2020
This is a book that everyone should read. It gutted me. It temporarily destroyed what I thought of the world. It taught me just how situational morals and ethics are in an environment not previously conceived. But it also showed me the endurance of the human spirit. It showed me how when but one drop of water is available to a group of dying people, they each wish the others to have it to survive. It enraged me. Ravaged me. Broke me. And showed me how to be kind to others in ways I'd never before contemplated. It made me understand that we never know the horrors that others have seen and to always show compassion first. I read this book for the first time almost 30 years ago and I've never let its lessons stray from my heart and mind.
2 people found this helpful
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Mrs. T
5.0 out of 5 stars Vitally important text for Holocaust studies
Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2001
Lawrence Langer's landmark study of the oral and videotaped testimonies of Holocaust survivors is essential reading for anyone interested in Holocaust and Genocide studies. I found the book most interesting-- and most troubling-- for the way Langer describes the narratives which the survivors use to describe experiences that are, literally, beyond any kind of known literary conventions. Langer suggests that the traumas of these events are so shattering that the survivors still are struggling for ways to evoke their experience, to bear witness in a way that other people can understand. At the same time, their narratives are part of a struggle to make these incomprehensible experiences bearable. The efforts of suriviors to articulate their experience is not only meant to provide a historical record of a terrible moment in history, but also to give the surivors themselves a way of framing their experiences so they can live with them.
What is most wrenching about these testimonies, is, perhaps, the sense that these experiences will never be fully evoked. The stories which the survivors tell are just that-- narrative structures designed to impose a certain comprehensibility to experiences which are beyond understanding.
There are any number of incredibly moving, visceral works on the Holocaust, but The Ruins of Memory stands alone as a unique, and terrible study of how, on an individual level, the Holocaust shatters the self. It is hard reading, but it is also essential reading.
30 people found this helpful
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History Buff
5.0 out of 5 stars Should be included in any Holocaust library
Reviewed in the United States on January 25, 2002
Lawrence Langer is well known for his cataloguing and interpretations on the Holocaust, but it took quite a few pages of this book for me to really "get" what he was saying. (I believe the first negative reviewer never "got" it. It's a difficult abstract concept, I fully admit that.)
Given that knowledge, and warned that you must enter the book without a preconceived negative notion about a split type of self, this book becomes fascinating. The details are quite dramatic, and it becomes progressively easier to see the point of the self splitting in order to survive the realities that simply can't be absorbed by the human mind. Fascinating work, and a book you won't want to put down.
15 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but not great. Lost potential in this read.
Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2019
While thoughtfully written from an individual with a very concise understanding of the English language, I had higher hopes for more personal accounts and actual testimonies. The author breaks between each recount of survivors to provide I depth analysis; however, I personally found it to be rather annoying. The stories told by the survivors give readers the same inclinations as those detailed by the author, which makes them seem unnecessary. The detail given to each individual story is amazing and the care put into the book is evident.
2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Spencer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 11, 2018
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All fine.
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mel
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 16, 2017
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great thank you
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