On the Defensive: Reading the Ethical in Nazi Camp Testimonies by Sharon Marquart

Abstract

Reviews 229 years in early modern France), approach to dramatic characterization (with a previously unheard-of depth of development, especially with respect to Figaro), and manipulation of dramatic convention (from comic language to recognition scenes) allows scholars to theorize the complex interactions Beaumarchais stages between theater and novel (Catherine Ramon), between “high” and “low” culture (Jennifer Ruimi), and with respect to classical comedy and tragedy (Marie-Emmanuelle PlagnolDi éval, Franck Salaün, Odile Richard-Pauchet). Particularly elegant contributions by Anne Richardot and Sophie Marchand underscore how genre-based criticism reveals Beaumarchais’s deep engagement with the core Enlightenment drive to question established hierarchies, both in terms of artistic categories and the conception of the individual in society. A more specific focus on particular thematic continuities across the plays confirms the role of La mère coupable in establishing the overall coherence of the trilogy. Jean-Pierre de Beaumarchais’s illuminating reading of the function of marriage across the plays (unlike the other essays, including the sparkling biographical sketch by the same author that opens the volume, this work was previously published elsewhere) serves as a fine counterpoint to Françoise Le Borgne’s reading of the role of husband, just as the notions of circulation and exchange link Florence MagnotOgilvy ’s analysis of money in Le mariage with Bénédicte Obitz-Lumbroso’s lively analysis of letters in all three plays.A bibliography on the trilogy and summaries of the volume’s chapters in both French and English conclude this useful, readable, and valuable collection. Louisiana State University Jeffrey M. Leichman Marquart, Sharon. On the Defensive: Reading the Ethical in Nazi Camp Testimonies. Toronto: UP of Toronto, 2015. ISBN 978-1-4426-5066-4. Pp. x + 220. The central theme of her project, Marquart tells us, originated in the unsettling experience of perusing L’album d’Auschwitz, a collection of photographs documenting the arrival, in 1944, of some 400,000 Hungarian Jews, of whom 350,000 “were gassed in assembly-line fashion hours after their arrival”(150).What strikes the author about several of the photos—also reproduced in her book—is a discrepancy between the captions provided by the editors and the effect the photos have on her. While the editorial comments offer a general description of the devious and highly efficient functioning of the machinery of mass slaughter devised by the Nazis (the victims are not aware they are standing in front of buildings housing the gas chambers, for example), Marquart finds that she is inevitably drawn to the individuals in the photos and cannot help but wonder “who these people were, what they might have been thinking in these moments” (158). Referencing Barthes’s theory on photographs and their impact, Marquart suggests that their powerful visual effect is due precisely to the contrast between a generalized, objectifying, even normalizing historical perspective offered by the captions and what Barthes calls the “punctum,” the visual shock of the photos brought about by the realization that “the people captured in them ‘are dead and are going to die’” (162). It is a contrast the author finds is often characteristic of Holocaust literature and, in particular, of the testimony of its survivors:“[M]y central aim in this book is that theoretical ethical knowledge cannot prepare us to respond to the ethical demands of atrocity”(26).What frequently happens is that attempts—wellintentioned as they might be—to rationalize and explain the Holocaust often lead to a defensive posture that ends up repressing or even ignoring the traumatic and traumatizing dimension of victims’ experiences. In making her case, Marquart contrasts the accounts of mainly two survivors. One is Jorge Semprún, whom she places among France’s and Spain’s “most famous authoritative intellectual witness writers” (9). Semprún’s intellectual approach is problematic, however, because it manages to turn witness testimony into self-centered“masterly narratives”that claim to speak for others. These are accounts that also tend to impose norms and values reflecting present needs or ideologies in terms of a universalizing logic or some artistic and creative designs. The other witness is Charlotte Delbo, a survivor and author whose work provides an implicit critique of the “well...