Est-ce bien (la nature de) l’homme ?
This article explores the nature of the “humane” as reflected in Jews’ autobiographical writings (mostly diaries) during the Holocaust. This question, the article claims, was introduced by the early Israeli Holocaust historians but was then neglected all together and never received its appropriate h...
Enregistré dans:
| Auteurs principaux: | , |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Langue: | Français |
| Publié: |
2008
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| Accès en ligne: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | This article explores the nature of the “humane” as reflected in Jews’ autobiographical writings (mostly diaries) during the Holocaust. This question, the article claims, was introduced by the early Israeli Holocaust historians but was then neglected all together and never received its appropriate historical inquiry. The article suggests in this regard a distinction between two models of historical writing on the Holocaust – a history of crisis and a history of trauma. The former is the model that dominates most historical and popular Jewish narratives on the Holocaust. It is based on a distinction between “inside” and “outside”. From this perspective, the Jews were defeated in reality (“outside”) but, as long as they survived, they could redeem themselves on the level of the community organization and the true inner feeling of pride and hope of the individual (“inside”). The “trauma narrative”, on the other hand, assumes that the catastrophe did not only occur on the “outside”, but rather destabilized fundamentally this very distinction between “inside” and “outside” ; therefore its story could not be redeemed. Reading autobiographical narratives written by the victims during the Holocaust, the article suggests, one is confronted with these traumatic aspects of the tragedy which penetrate into the inside of the human inner structure and aims to destruct it. Thus, reading these narratives challenges the common historical and popular narratives of the Holocaust which tend to be “crisis narratives” that ignore the traumatic unredeemable aspects of the Event. The article reviews former attitudes and treatments to Jewish Holocaust autobiographical writings and suggests a methodology for re-reading these texts within the framework of the “trauma narrative”. |
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