Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading by Leona Toker

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading by Leona Toker Benjamin Paloff Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading. By Leona Toker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. 281 pages. $40.00 (paper). The ways in which we read the literature that emerged from the experience of concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Europe, on the one hand, and the texts that arose from the Soviet Gulag system, on the other, will be markedly different in the twenty-first century from what they were in the twentieth. So broad a generalization is justified by its actualization already in progress: those who have known the spaces to which these texts refer are passing quickly from this life, and those who are currently being born into it will be more likely to respond to the similarities between a Gulag novel and a Holocaust novel than to default immediately to the theoretical and political arguments that have long striven to treat these bodies of work as separate. Those of us who teach this material to undergraduates know that doing so requires an ever-increasing amount of contextualization that just a few years ago might have been assumed to be common knowledge. At the same time, the separation we have carefully maintained between the stories of survival in Nazi camps and Soviet penal colonies are starting to seem more and more trivial to readers encountering them for the first time. [End Page 204] This is because the insistence that these phenomena—and, indeed, any experience of collective and forced detention, confinement, depravation, labor, and torture—are irreconcilably distinct from each other is driven more by ideological exceptionalism than by fundamental differences in institutions or their representation. On the contrary, the institution of the concentration camp is broadly comparable across the Nazi and Soviet contexts (and a great many others besides, both historical and contemporary), and the texts that have emerged from these places are generically so similar that insisting on their strict separation risks a kind of interpretive malpractice. This is not to reject the argument that the Nazi genocide perpetrated against European Jewry created a special inflection of the camp experience, since one inevitably experiences the camp differently, and the reader reads that experience differently in turn, when one's entire race or ethnic group has been marked for extinction. Nor is it to assume that the peculiarities of the Soviet penal system are not significant in themselves, from the system's endurance across generations to its eagerness to absorb those who, even in their internment, viewed themselves as true believers in the system that was persecuting them. But the sequestration that had separated "Gulag literature" from "the literature of Nazi camps" while scholars working on these corpuses were still defining their respective subfields in the 1960s and 1970s has long since calcified into a taboo, one that refuses an otherwise self-evident comparative field at the outset. The handful of more expansive treatments that Leona Toker mentions in a footnote to Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Concentration Camps—most notable among them, Terrence Des Pres's The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (1976) and Tzvetan Todorov's Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (1991; English translation, 2000)—are the exceptions that prove the rule. The cumbersome title of Toker's new study is symptomatic of this circumstance. And, in the interest of laying a strong foundation for future comparison, Toker is at pains to avoid weighing in on the exceptionalist position by stating, for instance, that concentration camp literature can or should be treated as a unified genre. Instead, [End Page 205] she emphasizes that her method is "intercontextual." In this way, she effectively does an end-run around the exceptionalism dilemma simply by treating the Nazi and Soviet systems as parallels of each other that are likewise mirrored in literary artifacts, focusing "on those cases where the two bodies of literature about concentration camps provide helpful contexts for each other—where what is clear in one literary corpus sheds light on what is obscure in the other" (9). By presenting Nazi concentration camps and...