itourist?
Bibliography
What follows is not a comprehensive reading list on Holocaust tourism, Jewish identity, mass culture, the politics of public art or anything else for that matter. It is simply an ongoing list of texts – books, articles, films, TV programmes, websites and the like – which, for some reason, have either had a direct impact on the development of itourist?, practically and / or intellectually, or are rather more obliquely connected to various project related preoccupations of my mine:
John Lennon & Malcolm Fowley (eds), Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London, Thomson, 2002) see Ch. 1, Intimations of Dark Tourism
”...the critical features apparent in the phenomena (‘dark tourism’) are, first, that global communications technologies play a major part in creating the initial interest…; second, that the objects of dark tourism themselves appear to introduce anxiety and doubt about the project of modernity (e.g. the use of ‘rational planning’ and technological innovation to undertake the jewish holocaust…); third, the educative elements of sites are accompanied by elements of commodification and a commercial ethic which (whether explicit or implicit) accepts that visitation (whether purposive or incidental) is an opportunity to develop a tourism product.” pp11
Paul Mendes Flohr & Jeheuda Reinharz (eds.), The Jew in the Modern World – A Documentary History (New York: Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995) see Section 6, Jewish Identity Challenged and Redefined
”Later, as a young man, I could not understand how, with the insignificant scrap of Judaism you yourself posessed, you could reproach me for not (if for no more than the sake of piety, as you put it) making an effort to cling to a similar insignificant scrap. It was indeed really , so far as I could see, a mere scrap, a joke, not even a joke. On four days in the year you went to the synagogue, where you were, to say the least, closer to the indifferent than to those who took it seriously, (you) patiently went through the prayers by way of formality, (you) sometimes amazed me by being being able to show me in the prayer book the passage that was being said at the moment, and for the rest, so long as I was in the synagogue (and this was the main thing) I was allowed to hang about wherever I liked. And so I yawned and dozed through the many hours (I don’t think I was ever again so bored, except later at dancing lessons) and did my best to enjoy the few little bits of variety there were…” Franz Kafka, My Father’s Bourgeois Judaism (1919) pp254-255
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988)
”...a differend would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments. One side’s legitimacy does not imply the other’s lack of legitimacy.” (ppxi)
”7. This is what a wrong (tort) would be: a damage (dommage) accompanied by the loss of the means to prove the damage. This is the case if the victim is deprived of life, or of all his or her liberties, or of the freedom to make his or her opinions public, or simply of the right to testify to the damage, or even more simply if the testifying phrase is itself deprived of authority (Nos 24-27)” (pp5)
”9. It is in the nature of a victim not to be able to prove that one has been done a wrong. A plaintiff is someone who has incurred damages and who disposes of the means to prove it. One becomes a victim if one loses these means. One loses them, for example, if the author of the damages turns out directly or indirectly to be one’s judge.” (pp8)
”7. ...to the privation constituted by the damage there is added the impossibility of bringing it to the knowledge of others, and in particular to the knowledge of a tribunal. Should the victim seek to bypass this impossibility and testify anyway to the wrong done to him or to her, he or she comes up against the following argumentation: either the damages you complain about never took place, and your testimony is false; or they took place, and since you are able to testify to them, it is not a wrong that has been done to you, but merely a damage, and your testimony is still false…8. Either you are the victim of a wrong, or you are not. If you are not, you are decieved (or lying) in testifying that you are. If you are, since you can bear witness to this wrong, it is not a wrong, and you are decieved (or lying) in testifying that you are the victim of a wrong.” (pp5)
”12. I would like to call a differend the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim…A case of differend between two parties takes place when the ‘regulation’ of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered byt he other is not signified in that idiom.” (pp9. see also ‘13’)
”...The one who lodges the complaint is heard, but the one who is a victim, and who is perhaps the same one, is reduced to silence.” (pp.10 very interesting that the two can be one and the same)
”’The survivors rarely speak’ (no.1). But isn’t there an entire literature of testimonies…? – That’s not it, though. Not to speak is part of the ability to speak, since ability is a possibility and a possibility implies something and its opposite…It is in the very definition of the possible to imply opposites at the same time. That the opposite of speaking is possible does not entail the necessity of keeping quiet. To be able (my emphasis) not to speak is not the same as not to be able to speak. The latter is a deprivation, the former a negation…If the survivors do not speak, is it because they cannot speak, or because they avail themselves of the possibility of not speaking that is given them by the ability to speak? Do they keep quiet out of necessity, or freely, as it is said? Or is the question poorly stated?” (pp10. see 15) my fathers photo album from malaya?
”21…To give the differend its due is to institute new addressees, new addressors, new significations, and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression and for the plaintiff to cease being a victim. This requires new rules for the formation and linking of phrases. No one doubts that language is capable of admitting these new phrase families or new genres of discourse. Every wrong ought to be able to be put into phrases. A new competence (or ‘prudence’ must be found.” (pp13) a new way – or environment – of listening must also be found?
”The differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be. This state includes silence, which is a negative phrase, but it also calls upon phrases which are in principle possible. This state is signaled by what one ordinarily calls a feeling (my emphasis): ‘One cannot find the words etc). A lot of searching must be done to find new rules for forming and linking phrases that are able to express the differend disclosed by the feeling, unless one wants this differend to be smothered right away in a litigation and for the alarm sounded by the feeling to have been useless. What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them….23. In the differend, something ‘asks ’ to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away. This is when the human beings who thought they could use language as an instrument of communication learn through the feeling of pain which accompanies silence (and of pleasure which accompanies the invention of a new idiom), that they are summoned by language, not to augment to their profit the quantity of information communicable through existing idioms, but to recognize that what remains to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to institute idioms which do not yet exist.” (pp13 – see Benetton essay! Also, see ‘Question’ ppxi.)
Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cape Town, Cambridge University Press, 2005) Thanks to Nick Dene for recommending this.
”By the same token, it is no accident, that the ‘collaborator’ trials being held at that time in Israeli courts were not mentioned in the Knesset, or that the tragic accounts being exposed there, living, bitter, contemporary tales of devastation, were never incorporated into Israel’s Holocaust memory; to this day, they lie like corpses in the obscurity of Israel’s legal archives. These tales were not recounted then (press reports were very brief) nor have they been recounted since. They were not given life, not passed on from generation to generation, nor taught in schools. This Holocaust literature, this record of the complexity of human existence and its negation in the cataclysmic situation in the camps was not handed down because it embodied – and still does – a vast threat, emanating from the very triviality of the ‘crimes’ exposed and the banality of the people who committed them; ordinary Jews, everyday people, who might well have been us; individuals trapped in insoluble dilemmas with no way out except suicide; who for one brief moment outside of ‘normal’ time turned into persecutors, beating, slapping, whipping, and torturing other people for more food, less work, less suffering, to save themselves – thereby forfeiting their place in the world. And because these accounts deal with ordinary, normal people, and expose the fragility and imperceptibility of the line between good and evil, right and wrong, and the leakage – invisible at the time – from one side of the line to the other – their troubling message could not be tolerated by a nation that teaches it’s children about the Holocaust only through ‘its direct link with the state’, and sends its sons and daughters on death camp pilgramage so that they will return as fortified Jews and Israelis with a reinforced national identity, and readiness to face imminent holocausts and the evil they themselves will have to commit in defence of the state and to ward off a future Holocaust or a ghost of a Holocaust.’ (pp87-88) Zertal is referring to the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment Law) 1950 implemented, according to Zertal, ‘to provide the Jewish state with means to bring to justice a handful of ‘collaborators’ from amidst the Jewish survivors themselves’ (pp60). See Primo Levi, ‘The Grey Zone’ in The Drowned and the Saved.
Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: the ruins of memory (New Haven: London, 1991, Yale University Press)
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (London, Abacus, 2003)
”Power is like a drug: the need for either is unkown to anyone who has not tried them, but after the initiation, which as for (Rumkoski) can be fortuitous, the dependency and need for ever larger doses is born; also born is the denial of reality and the return of childish dreams of omnipotence…contempt for the law” (pp49)
Victor E. Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning (London: Sydney, 2004, orig. 1959)
contrast below with Levi, Langer & Amery.
”In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way – in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory’.” (pp.49)
”In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the real damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrble surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better that did those of a robust nature.” (pp47)
”As the inner life of the prisoner became more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before.” (pp50)
”I practically trained a friend of mine who worked next to me on the building site to develop a sense of humour.” (pp54)
”Long after I had resumed normal life again (that means a long time after my release from camp), somebody showed me an illustrated weekly with photographs of prisoners lying crowded on their bunks, staring dully at a visitor. “Isn’t this terrible, the dreadful staring faces – everything about it.” “Why?” I asked, for I genuinely did not understand.” (pp58) Interesting passage which presumably refers to margaret bourke-white’s belsen ‘liberation’ pictures. Frankl explains why he felt the way he did, attributing his feelings to the fact that an image of prisoners on their bunks might suggest a period of sickness, during which time prisoners would not be available for work (but would run the risk of being ‘selected’). Frankl’s act of projection, and oppositional reading of the photograph – one which clearly, as he points out, flies in the face of conventional interpretations – is certainly fascinating but it is curious (from a psychoanalytic standpoint) that, given the fact that he was probably aware that the photograph he was looking at was a ‘liberation picture’ – something which, if it was a bourke white, would have been indicated by the text, (see zeller, Remembering to forget) he apparently disavows what he ‘knows’ to be the case – that these former prisoners are therefore not necessarilly ‘sick’ – at least not in the sense that frankl means it – and read the image as one which describes another place and another, rather different set of circumstances.
”The camp inmate was frightened of making decisions and of taking any sort of initiative whatsoever. This was the result of a strong feeling that fate was one’s master, and that one must not try to influence it in any way, but instead let it take its own course.” (pp66)
”The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed…Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him – mentally and spiritually.” (pp74-75)
”But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity – even under the most difficult circumstances – to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forego the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not…It is true that only a few prisoners are capable of reaching such high moral standards.” (pp76)” Jesus
see Frankl’s ‘sermon’ (pp88)
A man who could not see the end of his ‘provisional existence’ was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life.” (pp79)
Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love (New York, NYRB, 1986)
”Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.” (pp312) notes re: superego and the dialectics of identification?
Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London, Faber & Faber, 1994) see ch.4 On Success: A lecture to student councellors (pp42-58)
”The picture becomes complicated…when frustration for one part of the self, say, the super-ego, is satisfaction for another part, the id. In this picture one kind of success can be another kind of failure. In psychotherapy one always has to remember that anyone who is failing at one thing is always succeeding at another.” (pp49)
Moustafa Bayoumi & Andrew Rubin (eds), The Edward Said Reader (London, Granta, 2000) see Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims pp114-169
Dir. Ellen Flanders Zero Degrees of Separation (2005) Thanks to Kay Dickinson for recommending this.
Dir. Cynthia Madansky Past Perfect (2002)
http://www.sfjff.org/sfjff22/programs/program.php?PrgramOrder=21a
Don Delillo, White Noise (London, Penguin, 1986)
”I stood by Wilder’s bed watching him sleep. The voice next door said: “In the four-hundred-thousand dollar Nabisco Dinah Shore.” (pp239)
”Denise came in and sprawled across the foot of the bed, her head resting on her folded arms, facing away from me. How many codes, countercodes, social histories were contained in this simple posture? A full minute passed.” (pp61)
”He put his hands over his crotch, tried to fit himself under the toilet tank, behind the bowl. The intensity of the noise in the room was the same at all frequencies. Sound all around. I took out the Zummwalt. Great and nameless emotions thudded on my chest. I knew who I was in the network of meanings. Water fell to earth in drops, causing surfaces to gleam. I saw things new.”(pp312)
”Babette tried to switch to a comedy series about a group of racially mixed kids who build their own communications satellite. She was startled by the force of our objection. We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in a mass of advancing lava. Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.” (pp64)
”“TV is a problem only if you’ve forgotten how to look and listen”, Murray said. “My students and I discuss this all the time. They’re beginning to feel they ought to turn against the medium, exactly as an earlier generation turned against their parents and their country. I tell them they have to learn to look as children again. Root out the content. Find the codes and messages, to use your phrase, Jack…I tell them I’ve been sitting in this room for more than two months, watching TV into the early hours, listening carefully, taking notes. A great and humbling experience, let me tell you. Close to mystical.” (pp50-51)
”It wasn’t until four days later that he called me at home, at one in the morning, to whisper helpfully in my ear, “He looks like a man who finds dead bodies erotic”” (pp238)
”To break the spell,” I said. “To get away from routine things. Routine things can be deadly, Vern, carried to extremes. I have a friend who says that’s why people take vacations. Not to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.” “What is he, a Jew?” “What’s that got to do with it?” (pp248)
”Our pretense is a dedication. Someone must appear to believe…As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believes. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. There must always be believers. Fools, idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues. We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. You are sure that you are right but you don’t want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools. We are your fools, your madwomen, rising at dawn to pray, lighting candles, asking statues for good health, long life.” (pp319)
”Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.” (pp326)
Robert Harris, Fatherland (London, Arrow, 1988)
Shelley Hornstein & Florence Jacobowitz (eds.), Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2003) see Florence Jacobowitz, Shoah as Cinema and Carol Zemel, Emblems of Atrocity
James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: London, Yale University Press, 2000)
James E. Young, The Texture of Memory (New Haven: London, Yale University Press, 1993)
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil (New York, Penguin, 1992)
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/arendt.html
Saul Friedlander, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge, Mass., London, Harvard University Press, 1992)
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (London, Penguin, 1962) Thanks to Richard W. Hill for this.
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (London, Orion, 1968)
J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (London, Flamingo, 2001)
”For hours they drove through the endless suburbs of the city. The billboards multiplied around them, walling the streets with giant replicas of napalm bombings in Vietnam, the serial deaths of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe terraced in the landscapes of Dien Bien Phu and the Mekong Delta.” (pp4)
”’However, you must understand that for Travern science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography…’ Dr. Nathan turned to Webster with a smile. ‘One looks forward to the day when the General Theory of Relativity and the Principia will outsell the Kama Sutra in back-street bookshops.’” (pp49)
”...it seems that Travis’s extreme sensitivity to the volumes and geometry of the world around him, and their immediate translation into psychological terms, may reflect a belated attempt to return to a symmetrical world…In his mind World War III represents the final self-destruction and imbalance of an asymmetric world. The human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling spectator…” (pp9)
”He recognised the woman from the billboards he had seen near the hospital – the screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor. Yet these designs were more than enormous replicas. They were equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the film actress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her. The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies…The presiding deity of their lives…In some way Travis would attempt to relate his wife’s body, with its familiar geometry, to that of the film actress, quantifying their identities to the point where they became fused with the elements of time and landscape.” (pp13)
”The ‘Soft’ death of Marilyn Monroe. Standing in front of him as she dressed, Karen Novotny’s body seemed as smooth and annealed as those frozen planes. Yet a displacement of time would drain away the interstices, leaving walls like scraped clinkers. He remembered Ernst’s Robing Marilyn’s pitted skin, breasts of carved pumice, volcanic thighs, a face of ash. The widowed bride of Vesuvius.” (pp56)
”Eurydice in a Used Car Lot. ‘Where and when Travis placed his hands on her body.’ The poet Paul Eluard, describing his wife Gala, who later left him to marry Dali, said: ‘Her body is the shape of my hands.’ (pp17)
Dir. Marcel Ophuls The Sorrow and the Pity (1969)