Preface

Abstract

Preface Audrey Brunetaux (bio) and Michael S. Koppisch (bio) Seeing Charlotte Delbo / Seeing the Shoah Following World War II, survivors of the Holocaust struggled to recount an experience that remained beyond the boundary of words. How could Auschwitz be described in a way that someone who had not known its horrors might conceivably find factual? How to “make us see” the dehumanization and the extermination that were integral to what has come to be known as the univers concentrationnaire? A participant in the French Resistance and a Nazi concentration camp survivor, Charlotte Delbo has, especially because of the publication of her three-volume Auschwitz et après, been recognized as a major writer of Holocaust literature. Her unique style combines poetry with prose and employs a wide range of literary tools to convey the traumatic experience of the atrocities that she and her fellow prisoners endured daily. In her writings, Delbo challenges her readers to see her, to see her experience, to see the dreadful and horrifying mechanisms by which the camp universe functions. She incorporates into her narrative powerful images of the camps calculated, as she puts it, to “nous faire voir”—“make us see”—what happened in them. Painful details of an individual victim’s experience are noted on the page. Delbo’s originality lies in the conflation of the visual and the written to represent in her texts the unspeakable. In her highly visual writing, words become the eye of a camera, projecting onto the page a monstrous reality. These “shots,” made visible by the author’s rhetorical techniques, unveil the physical and psychological dimensions of the tragedy that might well remain obscured in strictly historical or journalistic accounts of events. Delbo’s traumatic, nonlinear memory calls up mental images that force the reader to confront the Holocaust as it destroyed individual lives. Reading Delbo is like viewing a film created by words that at once leave a trace on the page and become a repository in which is stored the memory of the dead. In a way, Delbo’s text becomes a site of memory not limited by the stasis of a monument. Although Delbo’s trilogy and others of her works were published by the Editions de Minuit, Delbo was not until recently seen as the major literary figure that she has become. Ironically, it was only after the English translation of Auschwitz et après by Yale University Press in 1995 that her work garnered the attention that it deserves. It is, in fact, still studied and written about more in English than in French. However, in the past few years, Delbo has been more widely read and studied in France, where the centennial of her birth was [End Page 7] celebrated in 2013 by an important conference at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. There have thus far been but three collections of essays about Delbo’s work in French. The first, entitled Dossier Charlotte Delbo published in Témoigner entre histoire et mémoire: Revue pluridisciplinaire de la Fondation Auschwitz (2009) is a broad overview of Delbo’s style and literary engagement. More recently, David Caron and Sharon Marquart published Les Revenantes: Charlotte Delbo, la voix d’une communauté à jamais déportée (2011), essays that focus on the idea of community in Delbo’s writings. Another edited volume, Charlotte Delbo. Oeuvre et engagements (2014), included proceedings from the Charlotte Delbo Conference that took place in Paris in 2013 to celebrate the centennial of her birth. The English critic Nicole Thatcher has also written several monographs about Delbo—A Literary Analysis of Charlotte Delbo’s Concentration Camp Re-Presentation (1999) and Charlotte Delbo: Une Voix singulière (2003). Delbo’s work often figures centrally in studies related to French literature and the Shoah and has been the subject of scholarly pieces on trauma, poetry, drama, memory and literary representation. The author has become an important reference in Holocaust studies, and major critics in the field have written about Delbo’s poetic, minimalist and theatrical prose from innovative angles. For our project, we invited these scholars and others to contribute original pieces. Since no collection of its kind...