La Littérature inouïe: témoigner des camps dans l’après-guerre. Par Ariane Santerre

Abstract

Analysing linguistic techniques and literary resources in testimonies by survivors of Nazi concentration camps in the immediate post-war period (1945–47), Ariane Santerre nuances the claim that the Holocaust is ‘indicible’, arguing that testimony’s ‘impossibilité’ to communicate derives from being ‘inouï’: marginalized, ruptured, and ‘inentendu’ (pp. 275, 23). In the first years following the war, survivor accounts were met with incomprehension or a categorical refusal to listen. Of the hundred or so published in France and Italy during this time, only a few are known today. Focusing on the testimonies written in French or Italian of six men and four women — Robert Antelme, Suzanne Birnbaum, Aldo Bizzarri, Marcel Conversy, Denise Dufournier, Guy Kohen, Primo Levi, Liana Millu, David Rousset, and Giuliana Tedeschi — Santerre sets out to recuperate those forgotten and marginalized, yet also includes the canonical. In Part One, ‘Aspects linguistiques des témoignages’, Santerre argues that the fractured language the authors use to express the traumatic double experience of living through and writing, so soon after liberation, about the concentration camps forced them to rethink their relationship to language in a way that challenged the very foundations of literature. She examines three features of the authors’ language: their reflections on ‘les non-coïncidences du dire’ (p. 53), the unmooring of language, and the gulf between survivors and the public; their metalinguistic reflections, which reveal how, faced with the loss of their linguistic reference points, they reinvested words with new meanings; and a Bakhtinian reading of the dialogism of Lagerszpracha — a mixture of German jargon, prisoner slang, and camp lingua franca, which the testimonies commonly include. Part Two, ‘Ressources littéraires’, first argues that survivors tried to understand and represent their experience through intertextuality, thereby activating the reader’s imagination and understanding through shared cultural foundations, particularly of Dante. In this way, testimony ‘se révèle véridique tout en s’inscrivant […] dans un imaginaire littéraire’ (p. 229) — although not without limitations. Sitting somewhat tangentially in the volume, the final chapter examines ‘L’Intermédialité des témoignages’ — the connections and reciprocal influences between different media and the space where such connections occur. Santerre posits the view of some authors that a single medium is insufficient for communication, and analyses rare testimonies that include photographs to self-authenticate or contextualize the author, or which constitute testimonial theatre. She argues that both media problematize authenticity and objectivity, artifice, and illusion. Her conclusion highlights the way in which the reader is central to how survivor testimony is written, and determines that twenty-first-century readers are well placed to receive and respect testimonies from both the Holocaust and subsequent genocides and state-led atrocities. Particular strengths of this accessible, convincing, and engaging volume are its detailed linguistic analyses via many select extracts, new insights into familiar testimonies, introductions to unfamiliar ones, and useful paratexts including brief author biographies — although its bibliography in six categories complicates navigation. Complementing Annette Wieviorka’s analysis of French post-war testimonies (Déportation et génocide: entre la mémoire et l’oubli (Paris: Plon, 1992)), this volume is extremely valuable for scholars and students of Holocaust testimony and of marginalized testimonial writers.