Van Alpan, Ernst. Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory. Stanford University Press, 1998
Ref. article:
- Steyn, Juliet. “Living in a Mausoleum.” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 23, no. 1, 2000, pp. 147–150. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3600466.
- McDonald, Helen. “I Feel, Therefore I Think.” Art Journal, vol. 65, no. 2, 2006, pp. 130–133. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20068471.
- Pedro Erber. “Theory Materialized: Conceptual Art and Its Others.” Diacritics, vol. 36, no. 1, 2006, pp. 2–13. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4621055.
(Steyn Page 150)
This book discusses why and how reenactment of the Holocaust in art and imaginative literature can be successful in simultaneously presenting, analyzing, and working through this apocalyptic moment in human history.
In pursuing his argument, the author explores such diverse materials and themes as: the testimonies of Holocaust survivors; the works of such artists and writers as Charlotte Salomon, Christian Boltanski, and Armando; and the question of what it means to live in a house built by a Jew who was later transported to the death camps. Van Alpen shows that reenactment, as an artistic project, also functions as a critical strategy, one that, unlike historical methods requiring a mediator, speaks directly to us and lures us into the Holocaust.
We are then placed in the position of experiencing and being the subjects of that history. We are there, and history is present―but not quite. A confrontation with Nazism or with the Holocaust by means of a re-enactment takes place within the representational realm of art. Our access to this past is no longer mediated by the account of a witness, by a narrator, by the eye of a photographer. We do not respond to a re-presentation of the historical event, but to a presentation or performance of it, and our response is direct or firsthand in a different way. That different way of “keeping in touch” is the subject of inquiry that propels this study
Van Alpen examines the cause of the unrepresentability of the Holocaust. He goes on to focus on the festure and forms of representation available to victims and survivors. For expressing their stories..
Page 44-45. Van Alpen argues for the power of art to transform the ways in which cultural issues are conceived in contemporary society. "
Page 96. Art is a laboratory," he writes, "where experiments are conducted that shape thought into visual and imaginative ways of framing the pain points of a culture" [xiii].
Page 99. Van Alpen discusses the work of photographic work of artist Boltanski – “who by referring to a factual reality, allows him to qualify himself as an historian….Van Alpen goes on to state that Boltanski evokes the Holocaust by reminding us of photographs and lists made at the time as documentation – are not based on reference per se.
Page 99. His ‘Holocaust effect’ is produced by means of a reenactment of principles that in a sense define the Holocaust – a radical emptying out of subjectivity as a road leading to the wholesale destruction of a people: genocide.
Page 120. Boltanski ‘foregrounds the Janus face of historical realism. He shows us, again and again, the presence of absence….
The ethical impulse of the book is framed by Hannah Arendt's remark: 'If we do not know our own history, we are doomed to live it out as if it were our own private 7 Claude Lanz n So , fate' (p. 1). Occupying such a house, bounded by other houses also 7. Claude Lanzmann, Shoah as counter-myth', p. 12. unceremoniously emptied of their Jewish occupants, has bonded van Alphen 8. Bernhard Schlink, The Reader (trans. Carol to another history which it is his uneasy privilege to share. This is how he Brown Janeway) (Phoenix House: London, describes it: 1997), p. 215.
The personal investment is in tension with the distinction between self and other: my own life, Elte's past. And Elte's past is crucially, both private, personal and collective because others shared the same fate. Even more threatening than this crossover of identities, my home becomes the conveyor of a collective memory, the memory of those who died in the Holocaust and never came home (p. 203).
Also paradoxically his remark points us to the failure of empathy - his own and others. After all, living in the houses of dispossessed and murdered Jews must be a familiar, although relatively secret, condition shared by countless other people in Continental Europe.
