close this bookForegone Conclusions:Against Apocalyptic History
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Notes

Notes

1 Against Foreshadowing

1. As I explain in the Acknowledgments, the term sideshadowing was originally coined by Gary Saul Morson and is central to his book, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). I then coined the corollary concept of backshadowing, and at one time Morson and I thought of publishing our work together as a single, two-part study. For all their differences in focus and areas of concern, Foregone Conclusions and Narrative and Freedom are linked in fruitful ways and can be read as two voices in what has become a newly emerging critical counter-tradition that unites ethics and exegesis from an anti-utopian and anti-systematic perspective.

2. In 1 Corinthians 10:6, Paul writes of the Jews in the desert, "Haec autem in figura facta sunt nostri" (These events happened as symbols to warn us). The original Greek verses, in which the Jews are called typoi hemon (figures of ourselves), make the scope of the appropriation still clearer. Amos Funkenstein points out that when "Christian polemics spoke of the 'blindness' of the Jews ( caecitas Iudaeorum )," it was precisely because Jews were "unable to detect in the old dispensation the foreshadowing of the new." Funkenstein, "Franz Rosenzweig and the End of German-Jewish Philosophy," in his Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 300. For a discussion of the history and literary force of Christian figural typology, see Erich Auerbach, ''Figura," in his Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11-76. On the way the Hebrew Scriptures were consistently transformed within the Christian hermeneutical tradition, see Rowan A. Greer, "The Christian Bible and Its Interpretation," in James L. Kugel and Rowan A. Greer, eds., Early Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 107-208.

3. Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), xv. My argument here is not intended to deny that Judaism, too, has been powerfully shaped by a providential reading of history, one in which foreshadowing is a central nar-

      rative device. The concept of history being controlled by God for the direct reward or punishment of the Jewish people, from the parting of the Red Sea to the military victories of the Six Day War, is fundamental to many religious Jews. However, Jewish theology is neither supersessionist nor progressivist in the sense I have described: unlike Christianity, that is, Jewish thinkers did not interpret the texts of another religion as earlier, incomplete prefigurations of their own narratives, and hence they had no reason to conceive of time as a progression from partial blindness to full vision.

4. Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 134: "Das Prinzip des unzureichenden Grundes! . . . Sie . . . wissen was man unter dem Prinzip des zureichenden Grundes versteht. Nur bei sich selbst macht der Mensch davon eine Ausnahme; in unserem wirklichen, ich meine damit unserem persönlichen Leben und in unserem öffentlich-geschichtlichen geschieht immer das, was eigentlich keinen rechten Grund hat." All references are to this edition and are acknowledged in the body of the text. The English translation quoted is by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, The Man Without Qualities, 3 vols. (London: Secker and Warburg, 1966), 1:181. I have modified Wilkins and Kaiser's formulations when the German seemed to require such a change. Source citations for Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften indicate the page number in the German text, followed by the volume and page number in the Wilkins and Kaiser translation. The German text is found in the notes.

5. Philip Roth, The Counterlife (Franklin Center, Pa.: Franklin Library, 1986). The whole of Roth's two-page preface to the Franklin Library Edition of his novel is interesting as an example of the kinds of themes he was pondering during the book's composition. Paradoxically, one of the things that makes his list intriguing is its very dullness and conventionality as literary formulae. Here, if anywhere, the enormity of the gulf between the lived richness of a fictive imagination and the relative barrenness of its theoretical promptings is evident.

6. Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, trans. Tim Parks (New York: Knopf, 1993), 22. Often, Calasso's description of mythical narration sounds like a recapitulation of Philip Roth's note to The Counterlife: "Stories never live alone: they are the branches of a family that we have to trace back, and forward. . . . Everything that happens, happens this way, or that way, or this other way." (10, 147)

7. Jasper Griffin, "Alive in Myth," New York Review of Books, vol. 40, no. 8 (April 22, 1993): 25-26.

8. Hermann Broch, Die Schlafwandler: Eine Romantrilogie (Frankfurt:

      Suhrkamp, 1978). See, for example, the description of Hanna Wendling in part 3, chapter 38, or of Ludwig Gödicke in part 3, chapter 56.

9. For a lucid summary of the changing interpretation of Freudian over-determination, see J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 292-93.

10. On the concept of "various chains of meaning" intersecting at the "nodal point" of a symptom, see Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of Psycho-Analysis, 293.

11. Just as each life can have a multitude of counterlives, so each history is accompanied by numerous potential counterhistories, not all of which will ever be narrated. Amos Funkenstein has defined perhaps the most common kind of counterhistory as a "specific genre of history written since antiquity [whose] function is polemical. Their method consists of systematic exploitation of the adversary's most trusted sources against their grain. . . . Their aim is the distortion of the adversary's self-image, of his identity, through the deconstruction of his memory." Amos Funkenstein, "History, Counter-history, and Narrative," in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 69; reprinted in Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 36). As examples of explicitly polemical counterhistories, Funkenstein gives ''Manetho's hostile account of Jewish history, based largely on an inverted reading of Biblical passages," Augustine's De Civitate Dei ("A veritable counter-history of Rome"), the seventh-century Jewish Sefer Toldot Yeshu ("Narrative of the History of Jesus"), in which Jesus is described as a corrupt magician intent on "seducing the unlearned multitude," and Protestant historiography (intent upon "the construction of a counterhistory of the Church"). Funkenstein, "History, Counterhistory, and Narrative," in Friedlander, Probing the Limits of Representation, 71-73; reprinted in Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 39-41.

2 Backshadowing and Apocalyptic History

1. This description is found in Gary Saul Morson, "Genre and Hero/ Fathers and Sons: Inter-generic Dialogues, Generic Refugees, and the Hidden Prosaic," Stanford Slavic Studies, vol. 4, no. 1 (1991): 336-81. The phrase about seeing reality with "the eyes of the genre" is from P. N. Medvedev and M. M. Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, trans. A. J. Wehrle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 134.

2. Holocaust is derived from the Greek holokauston used in the Septuagint in the sense of "totally consumed by fire." In the Septuagint it refers specifically to sacrifice by fire, assonant with the Hebrew term for sacrificial offering, olah, which, as Berel Lang explains, "designates the type of ritual sacrifice that was to be completely burnt (as in Leviticus 1:3ff.). The English usage of 'holocaust' in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries elaborated this literal sense of a religious burnt offering; later, the term began to appear as a metaphor for sacrifice more generally. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the term characteristically appears in reference to the complete destruction of an object or place or group, most often by fire, but also by other (mainly natural) causes. . . . Both the Hebrew designation shoah ('wasteland' or 'destruction,' as in Isaiah 10:3 and Proverbs 3:25) and the Yiddish variation of the Hebrew churban ('destruction')the latter traditionally applied to the destruction of the Temples and then reapplied metonymically to other destructionsare more accurately descriptive than 'Holocaust,' because they imply a breach or turning point in history ( and because they reject the connotation of 'sacrifice')." Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), xxi. James Young points out that "holocaust in the present sense didn't become the preferred term until between 1957-59,'' and gives the history of some of the other ways the language tried to define (and thereby implicitly interpret) the unprecedented Nazi attempt to exterminate all Jews: "the Hebrew term churban ['destruction'] suggested itself immediately . . . [but] its Yiddish echo ( churbn ) and explicitly religious association made churban less appealing to Labor Zionists in Palestine. . . . As a result the term sho'ah was adopted . . . marking the event as part of Jewish history but avoiding comparisons with specific precedents." Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 85-86. But even sho'ah, although in many ways preferable to other designations, is not without unwelcome implications of its own. As Chana Kronfeld pointed out to me, the modern Hebrew usage of sho'ah, when it does not refer specifically to the Nazi genocide (in which case it is almost invariably preceded by the definite article, ha-sho'ah ), is used for natural disasters like earthquakes or floods ( sho'ah teva means "natural catastrophe"), that is, it designates events for which no human agent can be held responsible and which, therefore, are not subject to moral judgment. See also Uriel Tal, "Excursus on the Term Shoah, " in Shoah: A Review of Holocaust Studies and Commemorations, vol. 1, no. 4 (1979): 10-11.

3. Irving Howe, "Writing and the Holocaust," in Berel Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 190.

4. Yael Feldman has studied "the extent to which Israeli culture . . . attempted to assimilate the experience of the Shoah to its overall Zionist perspective." During her childhood in Israel, when the Shoah was discussed, "centerstage was occupied (and quite literally so) by school plays about the Warsaw uprising or the heroic mission of Hanna Senesh. For us Yom hashoah vehagvurah (Day of Holocaust and Heroism) was not 'Martyr's Day,' as my current Israeli calendar translates it, but rather a celebration of resistance and national pride, a prolegomena to the Israeli Day of Independence." Yael S. Feldman, "Whose Story Is It Anyway: Ideology and Psychology in the Representation of the Shoah in Israeli Literature," in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 223. See also Saul Friedlander, "Die Shoah als Element in der Konstruktion israelischer Erinnerung,'' Babylon 2 (1987): 10-22. For a fascinating comparative study of the ways the Shoah has been taught in schools in Germany, Israel, and the United States, see Randolph L. Braham, ed., The Treatment of the Holocaust in Textbooks (New York: Social Science Monographs and Institute for Holocaust Studies, 1987).

5. Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo, misleadingly renamed in English as Survival in Auschwitz, rather than as "If This Is a Man," trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 82.

6. I say uncannily delayed because one of the more surprising aspects of Hebrew literature is that, in Alan Mintz's description, "between World War II and the Eichmann trial in the early sixties there are no significant works of Hebrew literature which directly engage the Holocaust, with the major exception of [the poet] Uri Zvi Greenberg." Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 158. It is true, of course, as several readers including Robert Alter and Chana Kronfeld have commented, that poets like Nathan Alterman, Amir Gilboa, and Hayim Gouri did write significant poems about the Shoah before the Eichmann trial, which began in April 1961. But Mintz's description of Israeli prose fiction is fundamentally accurate and characterizes one of its most problematic aspects. I explore some of the context and consequences of this delayed response in the section on Aharon Appelfeld.

7. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, 134.

8. My argument here is in no way metaphorical. On the contrary, similar demographic calculations were among the ways in which it first became known how many millions of Russians had been killed during Stalin's years

      in power. See Robert Conquest, The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (New York: Macmillan, 1970); The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Estimating what the population would have been without the mass killings requires "counting" the descendants not born to the murdered, and this is true for all historical catastrophes, not merely for the Nazi or Stalinist brutalities. Thus, for example, Alan Bullock estimates that "fifteen million men, women, and children . . . perished in the [Russian] civil war itself and the subsequent faminesixteen or seventeen million in all for the years 1914 to 1922, if one adds those soldiers and civilians killed during the First World War. Russia's population in 1923 was about thirty million less than would have been expected from projections of the earlier figures." Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (New York: Knopf, 1992), 103.

9. Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide, 214.

10. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 205.

11. Michael Ignatieff, "The Rise and Fall of Vienna's Jews," New York Review of Books, vol. 36, no. 11 June 29, 1989): 21.

12. Ibid., 22-24. Here it might be helpful to think of the distinction, long current in the social sciences, between logical and probabilistic conceptions of cause and effect. Such a distinction helps crystallize the idea that, to the people involved in making decisions, future developments which plausibly appear to be the least probable can, in fact, occur, while the most probable possibilities never actually come to pass. Clearly, a probabilistic understanding of causality entails more flexible attributions of responsibility for the results of specific actions than does a historically deterministic or strictly logical model. (I owe the suggestion to include these considerations to one of the readers of my manuscript for the University of California Press.)

13. Ernst Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1984), 25.

14. Ibid., 60.

15. Ibid., 376.

16. For a different, although related perspective on the link between Nazi imagery and kitsch, see Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas Weyr (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).

17. See, for example, Ruth Wisse's review, "The Jew from Prague," Commentary, vol. 78, no. 5 (November 1984): 62-64. Theodore Ziolkowski even calls the book "likely to be the definitive biography for some time to come

      in any language"; World Literature Today, Winter 1985, p. 86. John Updike, not surprisingly, is the least persuaded of Pawel's numerous reviewers. He maliciously compares Pawel's literary tone to the famous "'booming parade-ground voice' of that much-maligned father Hermann Kafka." More important, Updike records his discomfort with the way the biographer's "insistent references to the coming Holocaust shadow his narrative of Kafka's life" until ''there is a danger of making Hitler the hidden hero of that story and the Holocaust its culminating event." John Updike, "The Process and the Lock," New Yorker, June 18, 1984, pp. 108, 111.

18. George S. Berkeley, Vienna and Its Jews: The Tragedy of Success (Cambridge, Mass.: Madison Books / Abt Books, 1989), 87.

19. Arthur C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 12.

20. Mintz, Hurban, 226.

21. Pawel, Nightmare of Reason, 328.

22. George Steiner, Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1966), 50.

23. Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka: Representative Man (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1991). The general tone and level of moral scrupulousness of Karl's book can be gauged by the dedication: "To the 6 million, Europeans murdered by Europeans." Leaving aside the curious and confused decision to describe the murdered simply as "Europeans," a polemical move that makes little sense when one considers that the total number of Europeans who died in World War II enormously exceeded the six million Jews butchered by the Nazis, there is the more serious question of how the biography of even the most brilliant modern Jewish writer could possibly serve as a fitting memorial to the victims of the Shoah. The disproportion between the offering and what is being commemorated is so great that it approaches the grotesque.

24. Ibid., 471, 494

25. Ibid., 725n.

26. A useful contrast here is offered by the more modest and historically nuanced comment by William McCagg in A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670-1918 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 179-80: "Turn-of-the century Bohemian Jewry is the reputed source of Kafka's expressions of human agony. Kafka's apparent slavery to wordsthe agony with which slowly, slowly he followed words first into aphoristic expression, later into stories and never-completed novels; his inability to decide; his failure to finish; his extraordinary sensitivity to double meaningsall this can be associated with

      the 'in-betweenness' of the Jewish world in which he grew up. One may doubt certain aspects of some of the more deterministic assessments of Kafka: it is not certain, for example, that from the start his creative career was assertively Jewishhe seems rather to have discovered his identity when he was well along. Further, Bohemian Jewry's malady was perhaps less 'in-betweenness' than pronounced 'slipping and sliding' of the late nineteenth century."

27. The discussions between Benjamin and Scholem constitute the most impassioned and lucid commentary on Kafka that I know. In addition to numerous passages throughout Scholem's various memoirs, especially From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memoirs of My Youth, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1980) and Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1981), the key text of their discussion is The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-1940, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere (New York: Schocken, 1989). The best critical study of the crucial imaginative triangulation of Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem is Robert Alter's Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).

28. The lines from Mein Kampf are quoted in Lucy S. Dawidowicz, ed., A Holocaust Reader (New York: Behrman House, 1976). As Alan Bullock points out, referring to both Stalin's and Hitler's increasingly tyrannical and murderous regimes, "It is not only the appetite for power that grows with its exercise, but also the conception of how much further it can be pushed." Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, 182.

29. Little is made, today, for example, of Herzl's intense love of Wagner, a love that was as much a part of his most ardent Zionist years as it was of his earlier assimilationist phase, or of his plan in Der Judenstaat for a modern industrialized Jewish state rather than the redemptively agrarian one so central to left-wing Zionist ideology after his death. More poignantly, the initial callousness of the 1930s Zionist leadership to reports of Nazi persecutions, a callousness that so shocks us today, arose in part because the extent and ferocity of the German attacks was simply not imaginable. Thus, when Hapoel Hatsair (the weekly newspaper of the Labor [Mapai] Party), in the March 21, 1933, issue, "described the Nazi persecution of the Jews as 'punishment' for their having tried to integrate into German society instead of leaving for Palestine while it was still possible to do so," or when the Revisionist paper Hazit Haam editorialized on June 2, 1933, that "the Jews of Germany are being persecuted now not despite their efforts to be part of their country, but because of those efforts," the model the authors of statements like these

      had in mind was something much closer to a state-inspired pogrom than to systematic genocide. Only from the perspective of backshadowing can the Zionist leaders in 1933 be judged guilty of not fully comprehending the enormity of the catastrophe about to be unleashed on European Jewry, and recent studies that illustrate the "blindness" of the yishuv 's spokesmen [the Jewish community in Palestine] by citing public pronouncements from the early 1930s fail to understand that Zionism itself was unprepared for something as unprecedented as "the final solution." But ironically, only backshadowing allowed the same leaders to claim, after the early 1940s, that the death camps were the "inevitable" outcome of European anti-Semitism and hence served as "proof'' of the accuracy of their historical predictions and redemptive ideology. (The quotations are taken from Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman [New York: Hill and Wang, 1993], 10. Segev cites numerous similar statements from contemporary Zionist newspapers and political meetings in Palestine published during the first years of Nazi rule in Germany.)

 

30. Jacob Katz, "Was the Holocaust Predictable?" Commentary, vol. 59, no. 5 (May 1975): 41. See also Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).

31. Katz, "Was the Holocaust Predictable?" 41.

 

 

 

32. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), 12.

33. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 44. For a sympathetic treatment of Arendt's changing attitudes toward European Jewry, anti-Semitism, and Zionism, see Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). It is curious that the most representative collection of Arendt's essays on both the Nazi genocide and Zionism has appeared in a two-volume German edition, Essays und Kommentare, much of which is made up of scattered pieces originally published in English: vol. 1, Nach Auschwitz; vol. 2, Die Krise des Zionismus; both volumes ed. Eike Geisel and Klaus Bittermann (Berlin: Edition Tiamat, 1989).

34. S. Y. Agnon, Two Tales, trans. Walter Lever (New York: Schocken, 1966), 22.

35. The annexation of Austria was accomplished de facto the moment German troops entered the country on March 12, 1938, and became "legal" as the result of a plebiscite held on April 10, 1938. For Berkeley's dismissal of Arendt and Zweig, see Vienna and Its Jews, 106. Stefan Zweig's famous description of Austria under Franz Joseph as "the Golden Age of Security.

      Everything in our almost thousand-year old Austrian monarchy seemed based on permanency, and the State itself was the chief guarantor of this stability" ( The World of Yesterday, trans. Cedar Paul and Eden Paul [London: Cassell, 1987], 13), is regularly mocked for its shortsightedness by backshadowing commentators. But when Zweig wrote these lines, not long before his suicide in exile in Brazil in 1942, he knew just how illusory that "permanency" was and how unwilling the new state would be to guarantee the "stability" of its Jewish population. (Even the mention of Austria's "almost thousand-year old monarchy" is a deliberate and ironic echo of Hitler's boast of founding a ''thousand-year Reich .") Zweig's relationship to the Austria of the Habsburgs, and especially to the position of Jews within the empire, was characteristically complicated, but it was never one of naive complacency, and it was precisely to preempt the easy censure of backshadowing that he emphasized the reasons for general, as well as Jewish, optimism in pre-World War I Austria.

36. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History, 13.

37. Jürgen Habermas, "A Review of Gadamer's Truth and Method, " in Fred R. Dallymayr and Thomas A. McCarthy, Understanding and Social Inquiry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 346. I owe the suggestion to look into Habermas's review of Gadamer, a review that is also full of references to Danto's Analytical Philosophy of History, to Lawrence S. Rainey of Yale University. My argument throughout these pages was sharpened by Rainey's comments on an early draft of this section, which appeared in Modernism/Modernity, vol. 1, no. 1 (January 1994).

38. Habermas, "Review of Gadamer's Truth and Method, " 348-49.

39. It is only fair to mention here that, as Lawrence Rainey suggested to me in a letter, in the logic of Habermas's oeuvre as whole, he is primarily concerned with the legitimacy of a kind of "counterfactual backshadowing" (Rainey's term) intended to secure the critical potential of the utopian imagination. According to this view, in Habermas's writings, backshadowing is essentially counterfactual, and thus closer to my own position than it is to Danto's. But even Rainey agrees that the simplistic model of narrative and storytelling posited by both Habermas and Danto reinforces, even if unintentionally, precisely the kind of reductive historiographical backshadowing whose effects I criticize.

40. Wilhelm Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissen-schaften, in Gesammelte Schriften 3:233. Quoted in Habermas, "Review of Gadamer's Truth and Method, " 350-51.

41. My argument here is, of course, not intended to deny the importance

      of messianic thinking in the Jewish tradition. But Jewish thought has usually conceived of the significance of the messianic, and more specifically, the relationship between the messianic moment and ordinary time, in a different way than does Christianity. For Jews, the Messiah's coming does not automatically minimize, let alone negate, the value of daily activities in the world. For example, there is a famous Talmudic story about a man who is planting a tree when he hears that the Messiah has arrived. The fascinating conclusion of the debate about what he ought to do next is that his obligation is first to complete the planting of the tree and only then to go and see the Messiah. See Hayim Nahman Bialik and Yehoshua Hana Ravnitzky, eds., The Book of Legends: Sefer Ha-Aggadah, trans. William G. Braude (New York: Schocken, 1992), 361. Even in the direct physical presence of the transcendent, one's responsibilities toward the regular, normative world are not suspended; the messianic impulse in Judaism is rarely a form of judgment in whose light nothing else has any importance. In many strains of Christian thinking, however, the world is only the site of a pilgrimage intended to prepare one for eternity, and the actions performed in the world ultimately count only insofar as they are the grounds of the judgment that decides one's eternal destiny. (So, for example, in Purgatorio 5, Dante shows us that a man like Buonconte da Montefeltro could spend his life engaged in violence, but the sincerity of his last minute repentance suffices to gain his salvation.

42. On Schönerer's career both before and after the attack on the Neues Wiener Tageblatt, see Carl Schorske's Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1980). For a respectful, but I think fundamental, critique of some of Schorske's major assumptions, see Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The best brief account of the differences between Schönerer and Lueger, and of Lueger's increasing conservatism and rapprochement with the propertied classes once he was confirmed as mayor, see Robert S. Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), especially the chapter called "The New Austrian Anti-Semitism," 205-37.

43. Ignatieff, "Rise and Fall of Vienna's Jews," 22.

44. For a fascinating discussion of the link between Nazi rhetoric and imagery and that of Schönerer's movement, see Jean-Pierre Faye, Langages totalitaires (Paris: Hermann, 1972). Steven Beller says that while "Schönerer's brand of racial antisemitism . . . never posed a serious threat to Austria's Jews . . . [it] was very powerful at exactly the most crucial point, as far as Jews in

      the cultural élite were concerned, in the student body of the German universitythe group of future teachers and officials." Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 192.

45. Theodor Herzl, Briefe und Tagebücher, ed. Alex Bein, Hermann Grieve, Moshe Schaerf, and Julius Schoeps, 4 vols. (Frankfurt: Ullstein/Propyläen, 1983), 2:252:

Gegen Abend ging ich auf die Landstrasse. Vor dem Wahlhaus eine stumm aufgeregte Menge. Plötzlich kam Dr.Lueger heraus auf den Platz. Begeisterte Hochrufe, aus den Fenstern schwenkten Frauen weisse Tücher. Die Polizei hielt die Leute zurück. Neben mir sagte Einer mit zärtlicher Wärme aber in stillem Ton: "Das ist unser Führer!" Mehr eigentlich als alle Deklamationen und Schimpfereien hat mir dieses Wort gezeigt wie tief der Antisemitismus in den Herzen dieser Bevölkerung wurzelt."

(Toward evening, I walked along the Landstrasse. In front of the polling station, a silently excited crowd. All of a sudden, Dr. Lueger emerged onto the square. Rousing cheers, women waving white sheets out of the windows. The police held the people back. [Someone standing] next to me said with tender warmth but in a calm tone: "That is our Führer." This expression, more than any other declamations and revilings, showed me how deeply anti-Semitism was rooted in this population.)

46. For a powerful recent treatment of the legacy of Hitler's triumphant entry into Vienna on March 15, 1938, see Thomas Bernhard's play, Heldenplatz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989).

47. Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide, 195.

48. Even Herzl does not seem to have been overly worried about Schönerer's legacy or influence. He certainly saw Schönerer as a characteristic example of Austrian anti-Semitism, but in the Letters and Diaries there are surprisingly few references to him, and when Schönerer's name does appear, it is usually as one of a long list of dangerous political leaders. One typical entry in 1895 ( Briefe und Tagebücher 2:113) records a dream in which Herzl sees himself challenging either Schönerer, Lueger, or Aloys Prinz von Liechtenstein (1846-1920; a chief voice of the reactionary party in the Austrian Reichstag, successful anti-Semitic candidate, and ally of Lueger in the Christian-Social Party) to a duel:

Einer meiner Träume der unklaren Zeit war: Alois Lichtenstein, Schönerer oder Lueger zum Duell zwingen. Wäre ich erschossen worden, hätte mein hinterlassener Brief der Welt gesagt, dass ich als Opfer der ungerechtesten Bewegung fiel. So möge mein Tod wenigstens die Köpfe und Herzen der Menschen bessern. Hätte ich aber den Gegner erschossen, so wollte ich vor dem Schwurgerichte eine grossartige Rede halten, worin ich zuerst ,,den Tod

eines Ehrenmannes" bedauerte. . . . Dann wäre ich auf die Judenfrage eingegangen, hätte eine gewaltige Lassalle'sche Rede gehalten, die Geschwornen erschüttert, gerührt, dem Gerichtshof Achtung abgezwungenund wäre freigesprochen worden.

(One of the dreams I had during the time of my confusion [i.e., before the discovery of Zionism as a life-goal], was to compel Alois Lichtenstein, Schönerer, or Lueger to a duel. If I had been shot, the letter I would have left behind would have announced to the world that I had fallen victim to one of the most unjust of all movements [anti-Semitism]. At least in this way my death would have improved the minds and the hearts of the people. However, had I shot my adversary, I would have given a grand speech in front of the jury, in which I would have first regretted "the death of an honorable man." . . . Subsequently, I would have turned to the Jewish question: I would have delivered a powerful speech in the style of Lassalle, stirred up and moved the jury, forced them into paying me respectand then I would have been acquitted.)

49. George Clare, Last Waltz in Vienna: The Destruction of a Family, 1842-1942 (London: Macmillan 1981), 121; first published as Das waren die Klaars (Berlin: Verlag Ullstein, 1980).

50. Ibid., 186.

51. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 29.

52. Emmanuel Berl, Interrogatoire par Patrick Modiano suivi de Il fait beau, allons au Cimetière (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).

53. Arthur Schnitzler, Der Weg ins Freie (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1978). The translation by Horace Samuel, The Road to the Open (New York: Knopf, 1923) has recently been reprinted with a useful new foreword by William M. Jonston (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991). My quotations in the text are taken from this edition, with the original German provided in the notes. In 1992 the University of California Press published a new English version, called The Road into the Open, translated by Roger Byers with an introduction by Russell A. Berman. The sudden and almost simultaneous availability of two translations indicates that Schnitzler's novel is coming to be considered among the most important works of its period, especially for anyone interested in the question of Jewish life and consciousness in fin-de-siècle Vienna. For helpful discussions of the historical background to Der Weg ins Freie, see the chapter "Arthur Schnitzler's Road to the Open," in Wistrich, Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph, 583-620; Wistrich's earlier essay "Arthur Schnitzler's 'Jewish Problem,'" The Jewish Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 4 (Winter 1975), 27-30; and Harry Zohn, "Three Austrian Jews in German Literature: Schnitzler, Zweig, Herzl,'' in Josef Fraenkel, ed., The

      Jews of Austria: Essays on Their Life, History, and Destruction (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1967), 67-82.

54. Schnitzler, Der Weg ins Freie (Northwestern University Press ed., 250).

Glauben Sie, daß es einen Christen auf Erden gibt, und wäre es der edelste, gerechteste und treueste, einen einzigen, der nicht in irgendeinem Augenblick des Grolls, des Unmuts, des Zorns selbst gegen seinen besten Freund, gegen seine Geliebte, gegen seine Frau, wenn sie Juden oder jüdischer Abkunft waren, deren Judentum, innerlich wenigstens, ausgespielt hätte? Was sie Verfolgungswahnsinn zu nennen belieben, lieber Georg, das ist eben in Wahrheit nichts anderes als ein ununterbrochen waches, sehr intensives Wissen von einem Zustand, in dem wir Juden uns befinden, und viel eher als von Verfolgungswahnsinn könnte man von einem Wahn des Geborgenseins, des Inruhegelassenwerdens reden, von einem Sicherheitswahn, der vielleicht eine minder auffallende, aber für den Befallenen viel gefährlichere Krankheitsform vorstellt. (Fischer ed., 203-4).

55. Ibid. (Northwestern University Press ed.), 107-10.

'Mein Instinkt . . . sagt mir untrüglich, daß hier, gerade hier meine Heimat ist und nicht in irgend einem Land, das ich nicht kenne, das mir nach den Schilderungen nicht im geringsten zusagt und das mir gewisse Leute jetzt als Vaterland einreden wollen, mit der Begründung, daß meine Urahnen vor einigen tausend Jahren gerade von dort aus in die Welt verstreut worden sind.' . . . Nationalgefühl und Religionen, das waren seit jeher Worte, die . . . ihn erbitterten. . . . Und was die Religionen anbelangte, so ließ er sich christliche und jüdische Legenden so gut gefallen, als hellenische und indische; aber jede war ihm gleich unerträglich und widerlich, wenn sie ihm ihre Dogmen aufzudrängen suchte. . . . Und am wenigsten würde ihn je das Bewußtsein gemeinsam erlittener Verfolgung, gemeinsam lastenden Hasses mit Menschen verbinden, denen er sich innerlich fern fühle. Als moralisches Prinzip und als Wohlfahrtsaktion wollte er den Zionismus gelten lassen, . . . die Idee einer Errichtung des Judenstaates auf religiöser und nationaler Grundlage erscheine ihm wie eine unsinnige Auflehnung gegen den Geist aller geschichtlichen Entwicklung. (Fischer ed., 92-93)

56. On this theme, see Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Although I disagree with several of Gilman's premises and believe that in general the explanatory force of "Jewish self-hatred" has been greatly overestimated, Gilman's study is a serious attempt to understand the phenomenon, and it does not fall into the easy clichés with which backshadowing burdens Jewish history. But given the carelessness with which the phrase is used, there may be some advantage to using Hermann Broch's less familiar term "inner anti-Semitism." Nonetheless, for all my reservations, I

      have no doubt that some form of what we call "Jewish self-hatred" did exist, although more among the families of converted, rather than secularized, Jews. Indeed, one of the most discouraging examples that I have come across only became fully known after Gilman's book was published. In Ray Monk's biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990), there are unmistakable indications that Wittgenstein had internalized many of the most pernicious myths about Jews current in the Vienna of his youth, and in moments of doubt applied them all to himself. These even included the notion of the Jew in European history "as a sort of disease [that] no one wants to put . . . on the same level as normal life . . . [and to which no one can grant] the same rights as healthy bodily processes." (314). Monk comments how truly sad it is to see that

just as Wittgenstein was beginning to develop an entirely new method for tackling philosophical problemsa method that has no precedent in the entire tradition of Western philosophy . . . he should be inclined to assess his own philosophical contribution within the framework of the absurd charge that the Jew was incapable of original thought. "It is typical for a Jewish mind," he wrote, "to understand someone else's work better than [that person] understands it himself." Wittgenstein describes his own work, for example, as essentially nothing more than a clarification of other people's ideas:

Amongst Jews "genius" is found only in the holy man. Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. (Myself for instance.) I think there is some truth in my idea that I really only think reproductively. I don't believe I have ever invented a line of thinking. I have always taken over from someone else. I have simply straightaway seized on it with enthusiasm for my work of clarification. That is how Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa have influenced me. Can one take the case of Breuer and Freud as an example of Jewish reproductiveness?What I invent are new similes . (316-17)

57. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: H. Holt, 1938), 239.

58. The first text that I know of in which the actual phrase "a usable past" occurs is Van Wyck Brooks, "On Creating a Usable Past," The Dial, vol. 64, no. 764 (April 11, 1918): 337-41. Since its initial formulation in the work of writers like Dewey, Beard, and Brooks, the concept has been attacked as tendentious and ahistorical, without however, ceasing to exert its own counter-pressure on more conventional notions of historiography. See especially Arthur O. Lovejoy, "Present Standpoints and Past History," Journal of Philosophy, vol. 36, no. 18 (August 1939): 477-89; and Ernest Nagel, "Some Issues in the Logic of Historical Analysis,'' Scientific Monthly 74 (March 1952): 162-69.

59. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in his Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 255.

60. Ernst Pawel, The Labyrinth of Exile: A Life of Theodor Herzl (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1989), 61.

61. Ibid., 358.

62. It is worth pointing out, though, that debates about the proper relationship with the Arabs were always an important part of the internal struggles in Zionist ideology, as the early quarrels between Ahad Ha-Am and Herzl make clear. The controversy about the actual number and location of Arabs in Turkish, and then in Mandate, Palestine continues to be a fiercely controversial and partisan topic in current historical/demographic studies of the region. For a penetrating biography of Herzl's most important opponent in the Zionist movement, who openly rejected Herzl's optimistic assessment of future Arab-Jewish relationships, see Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).

3 Narrating the Shoah

1. Theodor W. Adorno, "Engagement," in Noten zur Literatur, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 2:423:

Die sogenannte künstlerische Gestaltung des nackten körperlichen Schmerzes der mit Gewehrkolben Niedergeknüppelten enthält, sei's noch so entfernt, das Potential, Genuß herauszupressen. Die Moral, die der Kunst gebietet, es keine Sekunde zu vergessen, schliddert in den Abgrund ihres Gegenteils. Durchs ästhetische Stilisationsprinzip, und gar das feierliche Gebet des Chors, erscheint das unausdenkliche Schicksal doch, als hätte es irgend Sinn gehabt; es wird verklärt, etwas von dem Grauen weggenommen; damit allein schon widerfährt den Opfern Unrecht.

      A more nuanced and provocative account of Adorno's sentences would emphasize not so much the reader's pleasure, but literature's own self-delight, the inevitable accents of mastery and joy in its expressive powers that all great art exhibits, irrespective of the immediate theme. From this perspective, what appalls Adorno is not the failure of literature to be adequate to the demands of its subject but, on the contrary, its limitless capacity to transform anything, including the death camps, into an "occasion" for the display of

      its potency. For a searching reaction to this problem in the light of our contemporary fascination with "poetry of witness," see John Bayley, "Night Train," New York Review of Books, vol. 40, no. 12 (June 24, 1993): 20-22.

2. Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1.

3. Fackenheim then spells out the implications of his commandment as follows: "We are first commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. We are commanded, second, to remember in our very guts and bones the martyrs of the Holocaust, lest their memory perish. We are forbidden, thirdly, to deny or despair of God, however much we may have to contend with him or believe in him, lest Judaism perish. We are forbidden, finally, to despair of the world as the place which is to become the kingdom of God, lest we help make it a meaningless place in which God is dead or irrelevant and everything is permitted. To abandon any of these imperatives, in response to Hitler's victory at Auschwitz, would be to hand him yet other, posthumous victories." This injunction was originally delivered during the symposium "Jewish Values in the Post-Holocaust Future," held in New York City on March 26, 1967. It was subsequently published under the title ''The 614th Commandment" in Judaism, vol. 16, no. 3 (Summer 1967): 269-73, and has been reprinted in Fackenheim's collection of essays, The Jewish Return into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem (New York: Schocken, 1978), 19-24.

4. Muselmänner (literally, "Muslims") is the term coined in the concentration camps for those "near-skeletons who, their feelings, thoughts, and even speech already murdered by hunger and torture, still walked for a while till they dropped to the ground." See Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World (New York: Schocken, 1982), xix.

5. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 11. Levi attributes the story to "the last pages" of Simon Wiesenthal's The Murderers Are Among Us, but this must be a faulty recollection since Wiesenthal's account is significantly different. Wiesenthal remembers being asked by SS Rottenführer (Corporal) Merz, "'Suppose an eagle took you to America. . . . What would you tell them there?'" After being repeatedly assured that he would not be punished for telling the truth, Wiesenthal told Merz, "'I believe I would tell the people the truth.'" But to this, Merz calmly replied, "'You would tell the truth to the people in America. That's right. And you know what would happen, Wiesenthal? . . . They wouldn't believe you. They'd say you were crazy. Might even put you in a madhouse. How can anyone believe this terrible businessunless he

      has lived through it?'" Simon Wiesenthal, The Murderers Are Among Us, ed. Joseph Wechsberg (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 334-35.

6. Himmler's speech is printed as "Document 1919-PS" in volume 19 of the Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal: Nuremberg, 14 November 1945-1 October 1946 (New York: AMS Press, 1948), 110-173. The passages cited are on page 145 of the transcript. A partial translation of Himmler's talk can be found in Lucy T. Dawidowicz, ed., A Holocaust Reader (New York: Behrman House, 1976), 130-40. For a fine analysis of the speech, see Peter Haidu, "The Dialectics of Unspeakability: Language, Silence, and the Narratives of Desubjectification," in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution'' (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 277-99.

7. Levi, Drowned and the Saved, 83-84: "We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the 'Muslims,' the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose depositions would have a general significance."

8. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 19.

9. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 8.

10. Helen Lewis, A Time to Speak (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1992), Foreword by Jennifer Johnston, ix.

11. Already before the Israeli Supreme Court ruling, District Judge Thomas A. Wiseman Jr., reviewing the case for the U.S. Sixth Court of Appeals, concluded in June 1993 that new evidence, largely from the secret police files of the former U.S.S.R., exculpated Demjanjuk from the "specific crimes" of Ivan the Terrible.

12. James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 26, 31.

13. Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 86.

14. Dominick LaCapra, "The Personal, the Political, and the Textual: Paul de Man as Object of Transference," History and Memory, vol. 4, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1992): 15.

15. Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 10. These examples were suggested to me by Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 133ff.

16. Berel Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 4-6.

17. Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide, 135.

18. George Steiner, "The Long Life of Metaphor: An Approach to the Shoah," in Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust, 160.

19. Aharon Appelfeld, quoted in Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust, 83.

20. Henri Raczymow, "La mémoire trouée," Pardès 3 (1986): 180: "De quel droit parler, si l'on n'a été, comme c'est mon cas, ni victime, ni rescapé, ni témoin de l'événement?" The entire issue of Pardés, on the topic "Paris-JerusalemLes Juifs de France: Aventure personnelle on destin collectif?" is extraordinarily interesting and inflects the issues we have been debating here with the singular perspectives of the contemporary Franco-Jewish intelligentsia. In English, see Ellen S. Fine's helpful essay "The Absent Memory: The Act of Writing in Post-Holocaust French Literature," in Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust, 41-57. My own interest in Raczymow was initially stimulated by Fine's sensitive discussion of his work.

21. Henri Raczymow, Un Cri sans voix (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 186: "Je ne vois rien. . . . Je ne veux rien voir. Vouloir voir me placerait du côté du S.S. chargé de voir par l'oeilleton de la chambre à gaz l'état des gazés."

22. Norma Rosen, "The Second Life of Holocaust Imagery" Midstream, vol. 33, no. 4 (April 1987): 58.

23. Ibid., 58.

24. See the interview with A. B. Yehoshua in Joseph Cohen, Voices of Israel: Essays on and Interviews with Yehuda Amichai, A. B. Yehoshua, T. Carmi, Aharon Appelfeld, and Amos Oz (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 74, 77. See also Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's analysis of this pattern as necessary for Israeli self-consciousness. She calls it "the slow but ideologically consistent process by which, in the decades after the war, the Holocaust was assimilated into the logic of Jewish regeneration so that it would not shake the foundations of the new state." Ezrahi, "Considering the Apocalypse: Is the Writing on the Wall Only Graffiti?" in Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust, 137-53; and "Revisioning the Past: The Changing Legacy of the Holocaust in Hebrew Literature," Salmagundi, nos. 68-69 (Fall 1985-Winter 1986: 245-70). As is clear from the arguments in this section, I am inherently suspicious of the appeal to raison d'état in such a context, but at the descriptive, if not justificatory, level I find the specific details of Ezrahi's argument fascinating. Nonetheless, one of the things that makes the earlier silence more like an act of repression than a "slow but ideologically consistent process" is that when, in large part triggered by the Eichmann trial and then reinforced by the

      trauma of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, it became impossible to continue avoiding a confrontation with the Shoah, that confrontation followed so powerfully the psychoanalytic logic of the "return of the repressed." The topic flooded the national consciousness, until in Saul Friedlander's description, "There are today more books in Israel about the Shoah than about probably any event in Israel's history." From a roundtable discussion printed in Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust, 288.

25. Freema Gottlieb, "A Talk with Aharon Appelfeld," New York Times Book Review, November 23, 1980, p. 42.

26. Yael S. Feldman, "Whose Story Is It Anyway: Ideology and Psychology in the Representation of the Shoah in Israeli Literature," in Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation, 229.

27. Tom Segev has shown how many of the most influential Zionist writers continued to maintain a punitive judgmental tone about European Jewry, even after the news of the death camps became widespread in the yishuv . Thus, for example, on November 27, 1942, " Davar [the left-wing daily paper of the Histadrut Labor Federation] published an article describing the extermination of the Jews as 'punishment from heaven for not having come to Palestine.'" Segev, Seventh Million, 98. In addition to the demoralizing tone blaming the victims for their fate, there is the absurdity of invoking "heaven" by an anti-religious, secular movement in order to add a still greater weight to the relentlessness of its historical self-confidence.

28. Esther Fuchs, "Author with a Dual Root: An Interview with Itamar Yaoz-Kest," a chapter in Fuchs, Encounters with Israeli Authors (Marblehead, Mass.: Micah Publications, 1982), 29. Appelfeld calls this strain in Zionism "a piece of wishful thinking. It tried to impose the peasant as the Jewish norm and cut itself off from the old Jewish typology of an uprooted people. . . . The Zionist wish to create a 'normal' society . . . does not take into consideration the greatness, as well as the flaws, of the old pattern. Though the early Zionist may have hoped to escape from the Jewish fate, one cannot escape from oneself, and should not really want to." Gottlieb, "Talk with Aharon Appelfeld," 42.

29. Segev, Seventh Million, 179.

30. Cohen, Voices of Israel, 138.

31. Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 204. Mintz goes on to empasize that the word for rescue itself, hatsalah, meant not just bringing the survivors to Eretz Israel but rehabilitating and "redeeming" them, which included having them forget the past. (243).

32. Segev, Seventh Million, 158. The strength of the yishuv 's desire to shed any signs of Diaspora weakness is evident even at the most basic level of speech. As Benjamin Harshav's The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 132, points out, "The 'Sephardic' [North African] pronunciation adopted in Israeli Hebrew, with its strong, 'masculine' stress on the last syllable of each word, was the symbol of virility and determination as opposed to the whining 'oy' and 'ay' of Ashkenazi [European] Hebrew." That this decision was made largely by Ashkenazi Jews who continued to look down on Sephardic ones as culturally inferior is not the smallest irony in the complex issue of Jewish self-transformation in its Zionist version.

33. In a 1986 interview, Appelfeld protested against his reputation in the minds of English-speaking readers as the author of novels about the assimilated Jews in the Shoah: "I've published ten novels and five collections of short stories in Hebrew plus a volume of essays. There are many other manuscripts in progress. The five novels translated and published in America thus far happen to deal with assimilated Jews. . . . But they are not my only Jewish subjects. . . . I am also working on stories of Jewish life in eastern Europe sixty or seventy years ago. And I have done three novels on the lives of Jews living in the Middle Ages." Cohen, Voices of Israel, 133. Yet in the same collection of interviews, Yehuda Amichai, A. B. Yehoshua, and Amos Oz all refer to Appelfeld as notable primarily for his portrait of the world of assimilated Austro-German Jewry on the eve of the Shoah, so irrespective of the quantitative injustice of such a judgment, it clearly echoes more than merely the accidents of translation into English.

34. Robert Alter, "Mother and Son, Lost in a Continent," New York Times Book Review, November 2, 1986, pp. 1, 34-35.

35. On this theme, see Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).

36. Austrian Jews had long been in the habit of vacationing at resorts that were Judenfreundlich [hospitable to Jews], less out of any particular "clannishness" or desire to remain exclusively among their own kind, than as a consequence of being barred from numerous other spas. George Berkeley quotes a proclamation by the mayor of Maria Tafel, one of these spa towns, issued in July, 1920: "It has been repeatedly observed that Jews are finding lodgings and meals in Maria Tafel. Owners of hotels, coffee houses, and inns are requested not to cater to Jews. . . . Maria Tafel is the most famous health resort in Lower Austria and not a Jewish temple." Berkeley adds that "an-

      other resort community, Erfinding, decreed that no Jew could stay in the town for more than twenty-four hours." Berkeley, Vienna and Its Jews: The Tragedy of Success (Cambridge, Mass.: Madison Books / Abt Books, 1989), 158.) In 1922, in order to be permitted to stay overnight in the resort town of Mattsee, near Salzburg, Arnold Schoenberg was asked to produce a certificate of baptism to counter charges that he was a Jew. Although Schoenberg had converted to Lutheranism in 1898, the incident at Mattsee, along with others of a similar character, acted as a catalyst for the composer's return to Judaism. Robert S. Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 630-32. Thus, no matter how assimilationist, or how eager to deny their identities, long before the date of the novel's actions, vacationers in a place like Badenheim would have been sufficiently conscious of being Jews to have chosen (or been indirectly forced) to go to a resort that was ready to accept them. Moreover, Appelfeld is fully aware of these details and freely uses them in his other novels. The Age of Wonders, for example, opens with the twelve-year-old narrator's memory of when he and his mother were suddenly expelled from the vacation resort where they were spending the summer of 1938 by anti-Semitic pressure.

37. Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim 1939, trans. Dalya Bilu (Boston: David R. Godine, 1980), 147. Future references are to this edition and are acknowledged in the body of the text.

38. Gabriel Josipovici, "Silently Mending," Times Literary Supplement, November 19, 1982, p. 1269. Josipovici makes his comment in a review of Appelfeld's The Age of Wonders, but his description applies equally to Badenheim 1939, both in its accuracy and in its blindness to how Appelfeld actually achieves his commendable discretion.

39. For a powerful, but I think finally unpersuasive, statement of the opposite point of view, see Philip Roth's justification for Appelfeld's strategy: "In your books, there's no news from the public realm that might serve as a warning to an Appelfeld victim, nor is the victim's impending doom presented as part of a European catastrophe. The historical focus is supplied by the reader, who understands, as the victims cannot, the magnitude of the enveloping evil. Your reticence as a historian, when combined with the historical perspective of a knowing reader, accounts for the peculiar impact your work hasfor the power that emanates from the stories that are told through such very modest means. Also, dehistoricizing the events and blurring the background, you probably approximate the disorientation felt by

      people who were unaware that they were on the brink of a cataclysm." Philip Roth, "A Talk with Aharon Appelfeld," New York Times Book Review, February 28, 1988, p. 28.

40. Thomas Flanagan, "'We Have Not Far To Go'" The Nation, January 31, 1981, p. 122.

41. See, for example, Irving Howe, "Novels of Other Times and Places," New York Times Book Review, November 23, 1980, pp. 1, 40-41.

42. Appelfeld himself has emphasized a spiritual affinity with Kafka, both the fiction writer and the diarist, and admirers like Philip Roth have stressed the pertinence of an Appelfeld-Kafka connection. Roth, "Talk with Aharon Appelfeld," 1, 28. It seems to me, however, that Kafka actually underdetermines the meanings and emotional resonance of a story, thereby making it hauntingly (re) interpretable as the reader is driven to work out its significance in new contexts. But the central place of the Shoah in Appelfeld's fiction, its function as a kind of negative sublime exceeding representation but drawing all of the local meanings into its darkness, has precisely the opposite effect from Kafka's uncanny openness to contradictory readings.

43. Idris Parry considers these similes as part of Appelfeld's technique of showing us "people who will believe what they want to believe, not what the evidence suggests," and aptly describes the novel's scenes as "created like a series of sharp perspectives in a model theatre." Parry, "The Voices of Sickness," Times Literary Supplement, November 20, 1981, p. 1374.

44. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, trans. Cedar Paul and Eden Paul (London: Cassell, 1987), 285. For an Italian parallel to the theme of Jews deliberately ignoring a tightening net of anti-Semitic decrees, see Giorgio Bassani's masterful novel, Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini (Torino: Einaudi, 1962), translated into English by Isabel Quigly as The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (London: Faber and Faber, 1965).

45. George Clare, Last Waltz in Vienna: The Destruction of a Family, 1842-1942 (London: Macmillan, 1981), 154.

46. It is only fair to point out that even in Badenheim 1939 there are occasional glimpses that a more complex and nuanced relationship to the characters is imaginable by the narrator. Apparitions like the old rabbi who suddenly materializes in the town just before the mass deportations, or the emaciated twins who present uncannily ritualistic recitations of Rilke, come close to being figures of sufficient resonance to elicit the kind of solicitude and affective sympathy that the rest of the novel is reluctant to provide. But in his very integrity, the rabbi serves principally to make evident how far the

      vacationers have strayed from any contact with Jewish tradition, while the twins' performance represents the kind of spiritually, and ultimately, physically self-destructive fascination that Austro-German high culture held for educated Jews. Nowhere does Appelfeld's sympathy, even when it alights on a particular character, bring with it a noticeable mitigation of his contempt for the decisions, daily habits, and cultural values of the assimilated Austro-Jewish community.

47. See Berkeley, Vienna and Its Jews, 266-97, for a description of Eichmann's methods and a tabulation of Jewish emigration from Austria. Norman Bentwich, who was the Attorney General for Palestine from 1920 to 1931, was in Vienna in the days of the Anschluss and has written a vivid account of "the savagery, the persecution, and the despair" with which the community was stricken. He describes "the vast queues that gathered outside the consulates of possible 'host' countries: the United States, South America, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Holland. The queues stretched for miles and were subject to constant attack." Bentwich, "The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Austria, 1938-1942," in Josef Fraenkel, ed., The Jews of Austria: Essays on their Life, History, and Destruction (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1967), 468.

48. The number of Austrian Jews granted visas by other countries is shockingly small: Britain let in 31,000 and another 9,000 reached safety in British Palestine; the United States admitted just over 28,000, China 18,000, Belgium over 4,000, Australia and New Zealand together 1,900, and Canada 82. (These figures are cited in Berkeley, Vienna and Its Jews, 282.) One of the most detailed, and depressing studies of the reluctance of the United States to do anything to help Europe's Jews is David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1984).

49. In one of his best stories, "1946," Appelfeld has a wonderful argument between two survivors temporarily sheltered in a Displaced Person's Camp in southern Italy in which the failure of assimilation is acknowledged, but the blame for it is put on the Aryans, not the Jews. Against this view is a kind of simple-man's, homespun, Fackenheim-like argument that only a return to traditional Jewish religious custom can make sense after the Shoah has made clear the catastrophic failure of other paths: "'An assimilationist is what I aman assimilationist born and bred.' 'Your success has been rather limited, if you don't mind my saying so.' 'Correct, but through no fault of my own. I did what was required of an assimilationist. . . . You would like me to proclaim to the world that assimilation has failed. From now on,

      every assimilationist will put on phylacteries and pray every morning.' 'That would be an honorable position of a sort, in my opinion.'" "1946" trans. Dalya Bilu, Jerusalem Quarterly, no.7 (Spring 1978): 127. In many ways, "1946" can be read as a kind of inverse Badenheim 1939, but without the later novel's allegorical structure or coolly mocking narrative tone. "1946" is a prosaically realistic tale with a complex and variegated set of characters. The story concerns a group of Jews who survived the Shoah primarily by hiding in the forests of eastern Europe and are now waiting to get to Australia or, if necessary (since many of them are reluctant to go there), to Palestine. Perhaps because it is set after the genocide and thus is "narratable,'' Appelfeld can let himself describe different types of Jews more convincingly than in his pre-Shoah settings. Nothing in "1946" serves as a warning or a prefiguration of future events, and its irony (about Zionism as well as assimilationism) is fully earned by the characters' own behavior. The story even ends with the arrival of the ship that will take them all to Palestine, as part of the still illegal aliyah, thus exactly paralleling, but in a positive sense, the train awaiting the vacationers at the end of Badenheim 1939 .

50. Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation, 16.

51. Ruth R. Wisse, "Aharon Appelfeld, Survivor," Commentary, vol. 76, no. 2 (August 1983): 74-76.

52. I owe this phrase to a subtle, if ultimately hostile reading of this chapter by an anonymous reviewer for the journal Common Knowledge .

53. This motif is so central to Appelfeld's vision of Austro-German Jewry that it figures in almost every one of his novels on the theme. As an example, consider the similarity between the passage from Badenheim 1939 quoted in the text and the following formulation from The Age of Wonders (trans. Dalya Bilu [Boston: David R. Godine, 1981], 163-64): "Since nobody knew that these were the last days in this house, on this street, and behind the grid of this lattice . . . since nobody knew, everyone buried himself in his own affairs as if there were no end to this life . . . even when everything teetered on the edge of the abyss."

54. Roth, "Talk with Aharon Appelfeld," 30.

55. One of the strengths of recent studies like Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992) and The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) is how clearly they show the crucial role of individual decisions and choices in carrying out the genocide.

4 Backshadowing and the Rhetoric of Victimization

1. Aharon Appelfeld, The Immortal Bartfuss, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 107. The depiction of the money-grubbing, petty Jews in this novel succeeds in undermining the Israeli desire for "positive" heroes without succumbing to the same allegorical reductiveness as Badenheim because in Bartfuss, and in other stories set in contemporary Israel, the Shoah has already occurred and the characters (who often lived through it directly), as well as the author and reader, know about the genocide. Consequently, the Shoah cannot serve as a privileged focus of knowledge by which we can judge the characters and their actions without anyone in the book being aware of the terms and criteria of judgment. In Bartfuss, the Shoah does not function as a guarantor of authoritative judgment precisely because of its availability to and presence in everyone's consciousness.

2. Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 227-28.

3. Ibid., 228. A basically optimistic assessment of the ideals and accomplishments of novelists whose work was composed within the "Palmah" ethos is found in Gershon Shaked, The Shadows Within: Essays on Modern Jewish Writers (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987), 145: "The earliest Hebrew writers in Eretz Israelthe majority of them native-born, or 'sabras'were the first children of a culture in formation. Born in the 1920s and raised on a Hebrew vernacular and a Hebrew literary tradition, they built upon the foundations for a new society that had been laid by their parents. Most of these young writers identified with the ideals of the parent generationthe pioneering elite of the Labor movement. . . . Not without reason were they called the '1948 generation' or the 'Palmah generation,' after the vanguard brigade of the Jewish armed forces during the 1940s. The 1948 generation was educated to fulfill the pioneer ethos of their parentsmost were educated according to a curriculum that broke completely with those that had molded the youth of the heder, the yeshiva, and the gymnasium. . . . This tendency was marked by an increasing dissociation from religious traditions and from the social values of the Diaspora . . . [and was marked by an] acute distaste for the image of the 'Diaspora Jew.'" For a more skeptical, and I think more accurate assessment, see Robert Alter, "A World Awry," in Times Literary Supplement, May 3, 1985, p. 498: "'Normalization,' . . . was once an important plank in the Zionist platform: the Jews, after centuries of deformation in the Diaspora were to become kekhol ha -

      goyim, like all the nations. The Generation of '48 struggled with this ideal and . . . wrote fiction under its aegis. This was above all a fiction about life in peer groups . . . [and] the novelists tended to derive their models of fiction from Hebrew translations of Soviet Socialist realism. . . . Almost all the characters were young, male, native Israelis . . . baffled by their historical predicament rather than by their own neuroses. Fiction was thus imagined out of the center of national life and evinced little interest in anything away from the center."

4. Shaked, Shadows Within, 18.

5. Haim Hazaz, "The Sermon," trans. Ben Halpern, Partisan Review, no. 23 (Winter 1956): 171-87. The lines quoted are from pages 173-75. The story has been reprinted, with a helpful introduction by the editor, in Robert Alter, ed., Modern Hebrew Literature (West Orange, N.J.: Behrman House, 1975), 253-87.

6. Hazaz, "The Sermon," 183. See, however, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's ingenious but implausibly affirmative reading of "The Sermon": "This story, written in 1942, can be viewed as a proximate and radical response to catastrophe. What is being put forward here is a daring proposal for non-Apocalyptic closure ." Ezrahi, "Considering the Apocalypse: Is the Writing on the Wall Only Graffiti?" in Berel Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 145-46. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 97, quotes from ''The Sermon" to illustrate a somewhat different argument from the one at issue here, but its interpretation of the story is much closer to my reading than to Ezrahi's. For an explicit critique of Yudke's view of Jewish history, see Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 7-8. The larger historical questions that Yudka's speech so simplifies are persuasively analyzed in David Biale's fine study, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (New York: Schocken, 1986).

7. Gershom Scholem, "With Gershom Scholem: An Interview," in Werner J. Dannhauser, ed. and trans., On Jews and Judaism in Crisis (New York: Schocken, 1976), 40-41.

8. Emil Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem (New York: Schocken, 1978).

9. Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 125.

10. Gershom Scholem, "Israel and the Diaspora," in Dannhauser, ed., On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, 248.

11. Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion: The Burning Ground, 1886-1948 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 539.

12. This sentence is quoted in The New York Times, April 3, 1992, p. A9. The prevalence of such a view cannot, however, be attributed purely to the Israeli right-wing parties. In the Knesset, Menahem Begin liked to point out that Abba Eban, the liberal ambassador to the United Nations (1948-49) and to the United States (1950-59), later a minister of education and culture (1960-63) and foreign minister (1966-74), had also described the pre-1967 borders as "Auschwitz lines." Quoted in Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 393.

It is worth pointing out, however, that increasingly there are encouraging signs suggesting that Israeli political debates are moving beyond a rhetoric of self-justifying ressentiment . For example, during the Knesset debates on how to help the Muslims being slaughtered in the "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslav republics, the memory of the Shoah was regularly invoked, not out of self-interest but as a reason to assist strangers of a different faith and historical/ethnic allegiance. Quoted in The New York Times, August 9, 1992, p. Y11.

13. The text of the letters exchanged between Rabin and Arafat are printed in The New York Times, September 10, 1993, p. A8.

14. I have taken Yaron Ezrahi's description from an article by Thomas Friedman, "The Brave New Middle East," The New York Times, September 10, 1993, pp. A1, A10.

15. On the history of the agonizing debates raised by these questions among Zionist thinkers, see especially, Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948, trans. William Templer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

16. Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 70.

17. Aharon Appelfeld, The Retreat, trans. Dalya Bilu (New York: Penguin, 1985), 62, 74. All further references are to this edition and are to be acknowledged in the body of the text.

18. Segev, Seventh Million, 109. The very term yishuv, as Benjamin Harshav rightly notes, is "a loaded word, meaning 'a stable settlement,' as opposed to the 'Exile' of the 'Wandering Jew.'" Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, x.

19. Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 212n5.

20. Yael Feldman offers just such an interpretation of Appelfeld's thus far untranslated novel, Michvat Ha'or (Searing Light) published in 1980. According to Feldman, "this whole novel in fact reads like a ferocious parody of the Zionist enterprise of re-education, of the attempt to 'baptize' the survivors as 'new Jews.' . . . At certain moments the distinction between Zionist and Nazi rhetoric is blurred (as in the repetition of the phrase 'Work is good. Work purifies' . . . or in the constant talk about the survivors' deformities and blemishes [ moomim, pegamin ] that need 'correction.')" For Feldman, though, " Searing Light stands alone in his [Appelfeld's] oeuvre," and she adds the fascinating detail that "rumor has it that the author forbade any translation of this work.'' Feldman, "Whose Story Is It Anyway: Ideology and Psychology in the Representation of the Shoah in Israeli Literature," in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 232-34. But if my reading of Badenheim 1939 and The Retreat is valid, then the same uncanny parallelism between Zionist and Nazi rhetoric that dominates Searing Light governs Appelfeld's earlier books about prewar European Jewry as well. I suspect that because Searing Light deals with survivors, whereas the characters in Badenheim 1939 and The Retreat presumably will all be murdered in the Shoah, it has been easier for critics to recognize, and for the novelist to acknowledge, the bitterness of the book's perspective on Israeli attitudes. But what is intended as a critique of Zionist contempt in a text set in Israel is actually the only judgment voiced and given implicit authorial sanction in the novels set in the final days of Austro-German Jewish existence. Appelfeld simultaneously accepts (in his "European" novels) and indicts (in his "Israeli" books) a particularly harsh Zionist interpretation of the psychological and moral worthiness of the European Diaspora, and he does so without ever confronting that central contradiction in his thinking. It is as though he has internalized the very attitudes he wants to contest, because he sees them as the only terms by which to understand the culture that perished in the Shoah.

21. Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's "Diary of a Writer" and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 118.

22. Meir Shalev, The Blue Mountain, trans. Hillel Halkin (New York: Harper and Row, 1991), 226.

23. I say "probably" deliberately because, at his best, Appelfeld is a very canny writer, and his relationship to the rhetoric and ideology of left-Zionism is sufficiently embattled to make it just conceivable that the parallelisms

      I have mentioned also figured in his own awareness while he was writing The Retreat . But if this is so, he has been extremely careful to cover his traces, and none of the reviews that I have read interpret the novel as anything other than a critique of Austro-Jewish self-hatred in the period just before the Shoah.

24. The term "semiotic totalitarian" was coined by Gary Saul Morson in Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in "War and Peace" (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).

25. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 98.

26. There are too many well-known instances of this phenomenon for me to make any example truly representative. But the American-born painter R. B. Kitaj's First Diasporist Manifesto (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989) can serve as an instructive instance of the most common tendencies. Kitaj, born in 1932, has become increasingly aware of his Jewishness but sees it almost exclusively as defined by the Shoah. Kitaj regards himself as a kind of "survivor" who identifies with "menaced Jewry," and links the alienation of modern artists to the fate of the Jews. Similar identifications, although formulated with more subtlety, have marked some of the most impassioned texts by writers like Susan Sontag and George Steiner. Finally, at the extreme of self-aggrandizement, there is a volume like the Canadian poet Irving Layton's Fortunate Exile (Toronto: McClelland and Stuart, 1987), in which "the Jews' unique and tragic encounter with history" serves largely to validate the author's claims for his own historical importance. I discuss Layton's collection from this perspective in ''Usurpations: A Poetics of Catastrophe and the Language of Jewish History," TriQuarterly, no. 79 (Fall 1990): 207-19.

27. David Evanier, "Invisible Man: The Lynching of Yankel Rosenbaum" New Republic, October 14, 1991, pp. 21-22.

28. Kristallnacht was ably defined by one letter writer to The New York Times, who had witnessed it directly, as the beginning of "the physical and institutional destruction of the Jewish community by the political power of the state." The writer goes on to say that "however ugly were the anti-Semitic slogans and the assaultive behavior of people in the streets [during the Crown Heights riots] . . . one thing that clearly did not take place was a Kristallnacht." Letter by Henry Schwarzschild, New York Times, October 5, 1991, p. A18.

29. Similarly, on October 29, 1992, when seventeen-year-old Lemrick Nelson, Jr., was acquitted of all charges in the murder of Rosenbaum, the Hasidic and black communities were united in the conviction that the whole trial was determined by racist motives. But for the one group, Nelson's initial

      arrest and trial was the result of collusion between a corrupt police force and a suborned city medical examiner's office eager to find a "black sacrificial lamb"; for the second group, the teenager's release was seen as due largely to the jury's anti-Semitism and fear of mob violence. An official report of the Crown Heights episode, commissioned by New York Governor Mario Cuomo and overseen by Richard Girgenti, the state's Director of Criminal Justice, concluded that the entire city administration, including the Mayor David Dinkins, Police Commissioner Lee P. Brown, and top police commanders, were all at fault for not preventing the escalation of violence. The report also blamed Nelson's complete acquittal on inept police procedure in handling the evidence against him, and prejudicial "statements and demeanor" by the presiding judge, New York Supreme Court Justice Edward Rappaport. Racism, the report concluded, was not a major issue in the jury's verdict. New York Times, July 21, 1993, pp. A1, B10.

30. For a history and internal logic of the theme of the victim-turned-oppressor, see Michael André Bernstein, Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

31. A. B. Yehoshua, Between Right and Right, trans. A. Schwartz (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981), 17.

32. For example, an anonymous African American senior at the University of California, Berkeley, told the local campus newspaper that he had participated in the April-May 1992 riots that followed the acquittal of the four Los Angeles police officers in the Rodney King beating case. He "confessed to beating up innocent white bystanders after the King verdict was announced. 'I admit I've beaten up so-called "innocent" white people this weekend[they've] never owned slaves, but [they're] reaping the benefits of [their] ancestors,' he said. 'I have no guilt,' he added. 'How else can you learn how it feels to have shit done to you just because of the color of your skin?' he asked." Kim Balchios, "Searching for Justice," Daily Californian, May 5, 1992, p. 2.

33. Gush Emunim (The Block of the Faithful) is among the most powerful of the militant orthodox movements dedicated to expanding Israeli settlements throughout the greater territory of Biblical Israel. One of its official slogans is af sha'al (not an inch), which aptly summarizes the group's position on any negotiations involving territorial compromise. Baruch Goldstein's rampage occurred on February 25, 1994, at a mosque in Hebron.

34. Robert Alter, "Deformations of the Holocaust," Commentary, February 1981, 49. Emphasis mine.

35. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 59.

36. Ibid., 204.

37. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 79. I have included the original Italian phrasing in order to make clear that Levi does not believe that the world of the Lager unmasks fundamental human traits, always present but normally kept hidden beneath a fragile layer of quotidian civility. Levi, Se questo è un uomo, in Opere 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1987), 88.

38. Sylvia Plath, "Daddy," in The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 223. It is, no doubt, only fair to point out that a different reading of the poem would emphasize its rhetoric as the re-creation of a child's distorted visionthe language of a child who grew up in America during the war and internalized American propaganda images. But such a reading, defended to me most forcefully by my colleague, Alex Zwerdling, still seems to me ultimately unpersuasive.

39. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ed. Thomas C. Moser (New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1968), 197, 130-31.

40. Ezrahi, "Considering the Apocalypse," 149.

41. Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide, 65.

42. Caryl Emerson, "Bakhtin and Women: A Non-Topic with Immense Publications," an unpublished paper the author generously showed me in manuscript.

43. Michael Frayn, Constructions (London: Wildwood House, 1974), no. 205, no pagination.

44. Michael R. Marrus, "The Use and Misuse of the Holocaust," in Peter Hayes, ed., Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 116.

45. Frayn, Constructions, no. 26.

5 Sideshadowing and the Principle of the Insufficient Cause

1. Austria declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914, and on Russia on August 6; the British and French responded by declaring war on Austria on August 12. Other combatants continued to join in the conflict at later dates, as, for example, the Belgians, who waited until August 28.

2. The Collateral Campaign ( Parallelaktion ) is entirely Musil's own invention and serves as a wonderfully comic device that allows the novel to examine the leading political, social, artistic, and intellectual currents of pre-

      war Austria by letting them compete for dominance in the campaign's search for a national slogan.

3. Victoria Yablonsky, "Ambiguous Visions: Ulrich's Inner States in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, " Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1985, p. 32.

4. "Also ich bin überzeugt, daß fast jeder Mensch heute unser Zeitalter für das geordnetste hält, was es je gegeben hat . . . daß der Geist der Neuzeit eben in dieser größeren Ordnung liegt und daß die Reiche von Ninive und Rom an irgendeiner Schlamperei zugrunde gegangen sein müssen. Ich glaube die meisten Menschen empfinden so und setzen stillschweigend voraus, daß die Vergangenheit zur Strafe vergangen ist, für irgendetwas, das nicht in Ordnung war."

5. "Nichts ist in der Diplomatie so gefährlich wie das unsachliche Reden vom Frieden! Jedesmal, wenn das Bedürfnis danach eine gewisse Höhe erreicht hat und nicht mehr zu halten war, ist noch ein Krieg daraus entstanden!"

6. "Es hatte damals gerade eine neue Zeit begonnen (denn das tut sie in jedem Augenblick). . . . Es war eine bewegte Zeit, die um Ende 1913 und Anfang 1914. Aber auch die Zeit zwei oder fünf Jahre vorher war eine bewegte Zeit gewesen."

7. Joseph Roth's Radetzkymarsch (1932) is probably the best-known Austrian novel that deals with the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. Unlike Musil, Roth foreshadows the war at every opportunity, usually in an extraordinarily overwrought rhetoric. For example, at the regimental summer fête that takes place almost at the novel's end, a messenger arrives to interrupt the dancing with news from headquarters. The atmosphere, predictably enough, is tense with the electricity of a summer storm, and the horseman's approach is described as taking place amid "flickering white sheet-lightning and darkened by purple clouds" (umflackert von weißen Blitzen und von violetten Wolken umdüstert). As the Colonel tears open the message, the footman "could not control his suddenly trembling hand" (konnte dennoch nicht seine plötzlich zitternde Hand beherrschen). The news, of course, is the report of Franz Ferdinand's assassination, and in the footman's mind there is a "supernatural connection" (übernatürlicher Zusammenhang) between the thunder and lightening breaking out all around him and the dreadful news from Sarajevo. Roth, Radetzkymarsch (Berlin: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1932), 512-14. The enormous critical as well as popular success of the book is evidence of how deeply wedded readers are to the conventions of fore- and backshadowing that Musil is deliberately seeking to undo.

8. "Größenteils entsteht Geschichte aber ohne Autoren. Sie entsteht

      nicht von einem Zentrum her, sondern von der Peripherie. Aus kleinen Ursachen. . . . Der Weg der Geschichte ist also nicht der eines Billardballs, der, einmal abgestoßen, eine bestimmte Bahn durchläuft, sondern er ähnelt dem Weg der Wolken, ähnelt dem Weg eines durch die Gassen Streichenden, der hier von einem Schatten, dort von einer Menschengruppe oder einer seltsamen Verschneidung von Häuserfronten abgelenkt wird und schließlich an eine Stelle gerät, die er weder gekannt hat, noch erreichen wollte."

9. "'Wissen Sie, daß ich vom Kopf his zum Fuß erschauere, wenn ich ihn sehe? Er erinnert mich an den Tod!' 'Ein ungewöhnlich lebensfreundlich aussehender Tod. . . . ' 'Aber mich ergreift eine Panik, wenn er mich anspricht . . . Mich beschleicht eine unbeschreibliche, unbegreifliche, traumhafte Angst!' "

10. Wolfdietrich Rasch sees the juxtapositioning of characters, plot motifs, and ideas as central to Musil's compositional technique. See Rasch, Über Robert Musils Roman Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1967) and his essay "Musil: 'Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften,'" in Benno von Wiese, ed., Der deutsche Roman: Vom Barok bis zur Gegenwart (Düsseldorf: A. Bagel, 1963), 2:361-419. Götz Müller's Ideologiekritik und Metasprache in Robert Musils Roman 'Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften ' (Munich: W. Fink, 1972) usefully analyzes how Musil's juxtaposing various discourses discredits characters like Arnheim or Leinsdorf who use ideas for self-assertive and ideologically tendentious reasons. Philip Payne also comments on Musil's "provocative juxtaposing of material. (A chapter which explores the inner world of Arnheim, for example, is followed by one which recreates the mood of Moosebrugger in his prison cell)." Payne, Robert Musil's "The Man Without Qualities": A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 101.

11. For a description of how Graf Leinsdorf and Diotima conceive of the membership of the Collatoral Campaign, see chapter 24, pp. 98-103; 1:139-44. Wilkins and Kaiser needlessly reverse Graf Leinsdorf's word order and translate the catch-phrase as "culture and capital," wherever it occurs in the novel. Their decision distorts the hierarchy of values made evident in the German wording.

12. "Denn wenn diese Art Leute im Deutschen Reich auch noch nicht obenauf waren . . . [ein Gerücht flüstert daß] dieser Sohn . . . sich auf eine Reichministerschaft vorbereitete. Nach der Meinung des Sektionschefs Tuzzi war dies freilich ganz und gar ausgeschlossen, außer es ginge ein Weltuntergang voran." (For although people of this sort were not yet quite on

      top in the German empire . . . this son . . . was preparing to take on a position as a minister of the Reich. In Permanent Secretary Tuzzi's opinion this was of course utterly out of the question, unless preceded by a world cataclysm.) (96; 1:136)

13. Hannah Hickman, Robert Musil and the Culture of Vienna (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 133.

14. "Er kä:mpfte um seine Seligkeit."

15. "Ein Jahr Urlaub von seinem Leben."

16. "Einen . . . bewußten Utopismus."

17. "Etwas . . . daß man Möglichkeitssinn nennen kann. . . . Ein mögliches Erlebnis oder eine mögliche Wahrheit sind nicht gleich wirklichem Erlebnis und wirklicher Wahrheit weniger dem Werte des Wirklichseins."

18. Among the classic critiques of die utopian impulse along these lines are Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, and both the journalism and the fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky, especially The Possessed and The Diary of A Writer . Valuable discussions can also be found in Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 5th rev. ed., 1966) and The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge, corrected ed., 1961); Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 1944); Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Secker and Warburg, 1957); Leo Strauss, On Tyranny: Including the Strauss-Kojève Correspondence, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth (New York: Free Press, 1993); Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951) and On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963); Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current (New York: Viking, 1980) and The Crooked Timber of Humanity (New York: Knopf, 1991); Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952) and Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (London: Secker and Warburg, 1960); Sylvia L. Thrupp, ed., Millennial Dreams in Action (New York: Schocken, 1970); Melvin J. Lasky, Utopia and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) and Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in "War and Peace" (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987); Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophical Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

19. I offer a detailed analysis of how just such a certainty led one noted writer, Ezra Pound, to embrace Italian fascism in The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

20. For an interesting discussion of the link between parodic and utopian thinking in three of the century's most important German novelists, see Manfred Sera's Utopie und Parodie bei Musil, Broch und Thomas Mann (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1969).

21. "Daß wahrscheinlich auch Gott von seiner Welt am liebsten im Conjunctivus potentialis spreche . . . denn Gott macht die Welt und denkt dabei, es könnte ebensogut anders sein."

22. The study of Musil's Nachlaß has become both one of the most contentious and specialized areas of Musil scholarship. Useful contributions to the debates about the status of the Nachlaß include Uwe Baur and Elisabeth Castex, Robert Musil: Untersuchungen (Königstein, Taunus: Athenaum, 1980); Wilhelm Bausinger, Studien zu einer historisch-kritischen Ausgabe von Robert Musils Roman " Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften " (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1964); Elisabeth Castex, "Probleme und Ziele der Forschung am Nachlaß Robert Musils," Colloquia Germanica 10 (1976-77): 267-79; Wolfgang Freese, ed., Philologie und Kritik (Munich: W. Fink, 1981); Adolf Frisé, "Unvollendet-unvollendbar? Überlegungen zum Torso des 'Mann ohne Eigenschaften,'" Musil-Forum 6 (1980): 79-104; Wolfdietrich Rasch, Über Robert Musils Roman Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1967); Marie-Louise Roth, Renate Schröder-Werle, and Hans Zeller, eds., Nachlaund Editionsprobleme bei modernen Schriftstellern: Beiträge zu den Internationalen Robert Musil Symposien (Bern; Las Vegas, 1981); Eithne Wilkins, "Musils unvollendeter Roman 'Die Zwillingsschwester,''' in Colloquia Germanica 10 (1976-77): 220-36; Hans Zeller, "Vitium ant virtus? Philologisches zu Adolf Frisés Musilausgaben, mit prinzipiellen Überlegungen zur Frage des Texteingriffs," in the special number Probleme neugermanistischer Edition of the Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 101 (1982): 210-44. Although a new translation of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, including some of the Nachlaß, has been announced several times during the past few years, so far it has not yet appeared in print. Consequently, English-speaking readers have had to rely entirely on second-hand accounts of Musil's posthumous drafts and fragments. Although I am far from being an expert in the technical issues concerning the Nachlaß, my general sense concurs with Philip Payne's that "for all their quarrels over the Nachlass . . . scholars agree on one point: no definitive final version of the novel can be established however hard one combs through all that Musil wrote." Payne, Robert Musil's "The Man Without Qualities, " 57. One implication of this situation, however, has tended to go unremarked: because there is no one, agreed-on ending, all of Musil's different suggestions and outlines can be read as sideshadows of one anotherlike

      the intellectual debates of the published sections, the possible paths sketched out in the Nachlaß are choices that exist only as sideshadows of a never realized, because humanly and logically unrealizable, closure.

23. Hence, the apparent "solutions" and "transcendences" that seem to be attained by Ulrich and Agathe in their conversations break down as soon as they return to ordinary society and confront the counter-pressures of quotidian living. The structural function of Agathe's forging a will is to motivate the plot to drag them back, in the most demeaning way possible, into the daily world, as Hagauer's legal responses make Ulrich and Agathe consult lawyers, worry about a possible trial, etc. But as a motivating device, the forged will is unnecessarily melodramatic. Far more effective is the simple, low-key way the "fall" from their insights and intimacies is narrated at the end of one of Diotima's parties: Agathe is tired, somewhat bored and wants to go homeUlrich would like to join her, but as various guests keep interrupting his departure to talk to him, he finds himself constrained by the social world not to leave, and so Agathe, disappointed in him, returns home alone, while he is dissatisfied with her for leaving early and without him. The world of Viennese social life by itself already acts as a "test'' of their intimacy and shows its inadequacy as a real solution. These chapters experiment with what one can call the "problem of the morning after a transcendent experience." Musil's question is: what has that experience and its attendant insights transformed in real, everyday life?

24. For two interesting discussions related to this theme, see Marike Finlay, The Potential of Modern Discourse: Musil, Pierce, and Perturbation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), and Thomas Harrison, Essayism: Conrad, Musil and Pirandello (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Harrison's study has a number of strengths, but, given its focus, its relative neglect of Montaigne is especially surprising. I have also benefited from a particularly insightful essay relating Montaigne, Musil, and Svevo by Dalya M. Sachs, a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley in a seminar I taught on sideshadowing.

25. "Millionen Toter eines erschütternden Kriegs."

26. "Was Hagauer später Vorschubleistung nannte"; "Trotzdem war es wie ein kleiner Riß im Schleier des Lebens, durch den das teilnahmslose Nichts schaut, und es wurde damals der Grund zu manchem gelegt, was später geschah"; "Das bedeutete also nichts weniger, als daß Agathe schon in dieser Zeit die Absicht gehabt hätte, sich zu töten."

27. "In dieser Zeit, da der Schutt 'des vergeblich Gefühlten,' den ein Zeitalter über dem anderen hinterläßt, Bergeshöhe erreicht hat, ohne daß

      etwas dagegen geschähe. Das Kriegsministerium darf also beruhigt dem nächsten Massenunglück entgegensehen. Ulrich sagte das Schicksal vorher und hatte davon keine Ahnung."

28. See Leo Bersani, "'The Culture of Redemption': Marcel Proust and Melanie Klein," Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 2 (Winter 1986): 402, 404: "I speak of an ambiguity which has led some of Proust's readers to raise the extremely peculiar question of whether or not the text we have is the one which the narrator tells us, at the end of Le temps retrouvé, that he finally set out to write. . . . À la recherche du temps perdu is a nonattributable autobiographical novel. The experience it records may, it is suggested, belong to Marcel Proust, or it may belong to a fictional character named Marcel, or it may belong to a fictional character not named Marcel. Or, finally, it may belong to no one at all." The essay is reprinted as "Death and Literary Authority: Marcel Proust and Melanie Klein," in Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 7-28.

29. "Der Typus einer Vernunft . . . die aber solche [Erkenntnisse] zu finden und zu systematisieren strebte, welche dem Gefühl neue und kühne Richtungen gäben, auch wenn sie selbst vielleicht nur bloße Plausibilitäten blieben, eine Vernunft also, für die das Denken nur dazu da wäre, um irgendwelchen noch ungewissen Weisen Mensch zu sein ein intellektuelles Stützgerüst zu geben." From the 1912 essay "Das Geistliche, der Modernismus und die Metaphysik," in Prosa und Stücke, Kleine Prosa, Aphorismen, Autobiographisches, Essays und Reden, Kritik, ed. Adolf Frisé, (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 989. The essay has been translated as "The Religious Spirit, Modernism, and Metaphysics," in Burton Pike and David S. Luft, eds. and trans., Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 21-25. I have amended the translation in several places.

30. For a fascinating recent exploration of some of the same issues told from the perspectives of a female protagonist, see Carol Anshaw, Aquamarine (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992). The novel opens with a brief prologue set at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics during the women's 100-meter freestyle swim competition. We watch seventeen-year-old Jesse Austin lose the gold medal to her rival, and lover of one night, Marty Finch. In the following sections, each dated July 1990, three equally possible and richly described future versions of Jesse Austin are depicted. In one, she has gone back to her small Missouri hometown and settled into an affectionate but not very stirring marriage, a budding career as a real estate agent, and a not-quite consummated affair with a local skywriter. In the next, she is a lesbian lit-

      erature professor in New York, visiting her Missouri home in the company of her lover, a glamorous television soap opera actress. In the third version, Jesse lives in a seedy Florida beach town, running a failing swim school and trying to cope with little money, two difficult teenage children, a maddeningly self-satisfied ex-husband, and a friendly but not deeply committed black lover. Many of the same characters appear in each section, as do numerous aspects of Jesse's own temperament, and Anshaw manages to make each future convincing as one of the paths Jesse might have taken after Mexico. By bestowing the narrative attention and energy equally to each of the imagined destinies, the novel makes certain we read each of Jesse's counterlives in the light of the other possibilities, and each event is sideshadowed by the whole dense swarm of parallel circumstances, actions, and thoughts that have been traced in the course of Aquamarine 's unfolding.

31. Louis Begley, The Man Who Was Late (New York: Knopf, 1993), 199.

32. "Im Grunde wissen in den Jahren der Lebensmitte wenig Menschen mehr, wie sie eigentlich zu sich selbst gekommen sind, zu ihren Vergnügungen, ihrer Weltanschauung, ihrer Frau, ihrem Charakter, Beruf und ihren Erfolgen, aber sie haben das Gefühl, daß sich nun nicht mehr viel ändern kann. Es ließ sich sogar behaupten, daß sie betrogen worden seien, denn man kann nirgends einen zureichenden Grund dafür entdecken, daß alles gerade so kam, wie es gekommen ist; es hätte auch anders kommen können."

33. Cynthia Ozick, "Alfred Chester's Wig," The New Yorker, March 30, 1992, p. 80.

34. "Parce que je n'accompagnai pas mon père à un dîner officiel où il devait y avoir les Bontemps avec leur nièce Albertine, petite jeune fille presque encore enfant." Marcel Proust, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs," in À la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1987), 1:615. Earlier in the same volume, Gilberte briefly describes Albertine herself as "la fameuse 'Albertine.' Elle sera sûrement très 'fast'" (503), and although this incident holds a similar pleasure for the re-reader as the one I have quoted, it is less intense because Marcel is not directly involved and there is no suggestion that he might have become interested in Albertine much sooner.

35. In one of the many moments of deep-rooted affinity that resonate between À la recherche du temps perdu and The Man Without Qualities, Musil's narrator uses a similar image of the beloved being transformed from one figure amid a circle of friends into the lover's unique object of desire: "They [ideas] flash upon the mind in a startling way reminiscent of another sudden

      recognitionthat of the beloved who has been merely one girl among the other girls till the moment when the lover is suddenly amazed that he could ever have supposed any of the others to be her equal." (Daß ihr überraschendes Aufleuchten an das der Geliebten erinnert, die längst schon zwischen den anderen Freundinnen da war, ehe der bestürzte Freier zu verstehen aufhört, daß er ihr andere hat gleichstellen können.) (719-20; 3:74-75). The same passage also offers an amusing index of the difference between the two novels, since in Musil the image is used not only as a comment on the nature of desire but, more important, on the accidental and unexpected ways one often comes upon a decisive idea when working on a particularly intractable problem in mathematics!

36. "Peut-être parce qu'elle était ennuyeuse, ou parce qu'elle était méchante, ou parce qu'elle était d'une branche inférieure, ou peut-être sans aucune raisonne." Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu 1:323. For an interesting discussion relating this and similar passages in the Recherche to the question of "a demonstration of the failure of hypotheses," see Margaret E. Gray, Postmodern Proust (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992),56-65.

37. James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 30. Young is speaking here of the difference between the testimony of a diarist and that of a survivor-memoirist of the Shoah. But his description accurately distinguishes between any retrospective account and one written at the time that the events narrated were taking place, whether those events were catastrophes or not.

38. In these comments I am, of course, not seeking to minimize the role of politics and social history in À la recherche du temps perdu, since events like the Dreyfus case and the First World War are both clearly integral to the narrative. But it is nonetheless true that the protagonist is only indirectly caught up in these public crises. Neither event is decisive in shaping Marcel's consciousness, and they cannot be said either to constitute Marcel's most significant experiences or to precipitate the narrator's acutest speculations.

6(In Place of a) Conclusion The Unmastered Future

1. The notion of "prosaics" in this sense was first made explicit by Gary Saul Morson in Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in 'War and Peace" (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987) and in his "Prosaics:

      An Approach to the Humanities," American Scholar, Autumn 1988, pp. 515-28. It was further developed by Caryl Emerson and Gary Saul Morson in Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). I have both drawn upon and questioned Emerson's and Morson's Bakhtin-inspired understanding of prosaics, and suggested other directions and issues that prosaic studies ought to explore in Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1965), 17-19.

3. "Es gibt kein ethisches Handeln, sondern nur einen ethischen Zustand," in Prosa und Stücke, Kleine Prosa, Aphorismen, Autobiographisches, Essays und Reden, Kritik, ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 1017. For a suggestive, but unfortunately rather sketchy discussion of some of the links between Wittgenstein's and Musil's thinking, see Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973).

4. I am indebted here to a stimulating letter from Kenneth A. Bruffee in which he raises a series of important questions about my earlier account of prosaic ethics in Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). See also Bruffee's analysis in Elegiac Romance: Cultural Change and Loss of the Hero in Modern Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). My discussion in this chapter deliberately returns to some of the formulations I first ventured in Bitter Carnival, but augments and, I hope, clarifies them further in light of the new context opened up by the theory of sideshadowing and the concrete example of Jewish history.

5. Amos Funkenstein, "Theological Responses to the Holocaust," in his Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 306-37.

6. I have taken these sentences from pages 332-33 of Funkenstein, "Theological Responses to the Holocaust."

7. Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 87. In tracing one writer's attempt to forge a new, radically idiosyncratic novelistic voice in modern Hebrew, Robert Alter makes a useful distinction between the European novel's traditional focus on the specific individual and that of "the Hebrew literary tradition . . . from the rabbinic period onward through its multiple historical offshoots . . . [which was] inclined to see the individual

      as a prototype or spokesman for the collective." Alter, "Fogel and the Forging of a Hebrew Self," Prooftexts 13 (1993): 9.

8. I owe this phrase to Douglas Abrams Arava of the University of California Press.

9. Yehuda Amichai, "Tourists," in Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell, eds. and trans., Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 137-38.

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