Historical comparisons of Hitler's barbarity are as lacking as much of the prose that since has tried to deal with it. by Patrick A. Smith

For nearly three generations now, the word "holocaust" has brought to mind scenes of unimaginable violence and loss, the terrifying legacy of the "war that shaped the world." Witness the reaction of an American officer, in a letter dated April 12, 1945, when he and his men freed the prisoners of a German concentration camp:

"I had previously, at times, been remorseful over the destruction of the German cities and villages and had reluctantly ordered civilians out of their homes so I could have a place for my office and a place to sleep. Never again will I feel that way after seeing this. I will gladly shoot either soldier or civilian to bring such things to an end."

The most common estimates for the number of dead in the Holocaust claim 6,000,000, although others double or triple that figure. Of the 1,300,000 deportees to Auschwitz, the center of the concentration camp system, 900,000 were immediately put to death, and another 200,000 died of starvation, disease, and exhaustion. Even for people too young to recall firsthand the accounts of the Europe's liberation, photographs from those days are etched in our minds: naked, twisted bodies, stacked like cordwood; prisoners kneeling over mass graves at the instant they are executed; hundreds of thousands of pairs of shoes piled outside gas chambers; German prisoners of war and local citizens forced to view the aftermath of the carnage.

More than half a century later, the world is still trying to make sense of such events that have no precedent in human history. Even the best writers this century has produced have struggled to come to grips with the Holocaust, resulting in a post-war body of literature that often fails as much as it succeeds in helping readers deal with Nazi barbarity and its chilling commentary on humanity.

The Holocaust and its effect on post-war literature is the issue at the core of Dr. William Cloonan's recent study, The Writing of War: French and German Fiction and World War II (1999, University Press of Florida). Cloonan (Ph.D. UNC-Chapel Hill), a professor of modern languages and linguistics, strives to show how language conveys (or often fails to convey) complex ideas and how we learn to cope with unspeakable tragedy by replacing old modes of communication with the new.

Bill Cloonan

The idea for the book came out of the realization, says the author, that "for my generation, World War II was a watershed." Cloonan, who immerses himself in French and German culture during the summer and teaches literature and language during the academic year, has met head-on the challenge of defining what makes the best war literature good and what causes so much to fail. Such a study has long been a work in progress for the author, who grew up, he says, "learning about the superiority of Western-white-civilization, the grandeur of the Enlightenment Tradition. Trying to make sense out of the Final Solution was a major intellectual issue." For Cloonan, that sense-making begins with his preference for the phrase "final solution" rather than "holocaust." He feels that the latter term is unnecessarily value-laden, implying that some redeeming cultural or religious significance came from the conspiracy to erase a people and their memory from the face of the earth.

If the war was a watershed period for the generation that came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, the events of Hitler's "Final Solution" unleashed a torrent of change on the literature that came after. Cloonan details the disappearance of a progressive view of history and the arrival of a new way of seeing, the result of a desire by witnesses of the horror to get it behind them and heal the chasm that the Nazis opened with their policies of extermination.

Cloonan's The Writing of War, published by the University of Florida Press, 1999

The clash between the rational view of what happened-an analysis of the unique aspects of the war-and the more abstract and fragmented view-the tendency to see WWII as just another European bloodletting-is signaled by the failure of some of the greatest writers of the time-including German diarist Ernst Junger and Nobel Prize honorees Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre-to adequately describe the war's effect on their generation, says Cloonan. Others-both French and German alike-including Michel Tournier, Christa Wolf, Marguerite Duras, Nobel laureate Claude Simon, and Günter Grass, the 1999 Nobel honoree in literature, weren't bound by the old ways of thinking and after the war used vivid detail and intricate narrative devices to describe a society that was falling apart at the seams.

When a nation's best artists attempt to come to grips with an event as horrific as the Final Solution, art becomes a high-stakes game of alerting future generations to the dangers of forgetting (or laundering) the past, Cloonan argues. Without art to carry the load of legacy, societies forget. The novel can thus serve as a social document, bearing the weight of history. Still, the "meaning" of literature is often slippery and its interpretation can be as much a subjective individual act as its creation.

"Literature doesn't offer solutions," says Cloonan. "It does offer varieties of ways of understanding the world, rather than the explanation."

The success or failure of writers to describe the destruction and desolation of the war depends, according to Cloonan, on the way the story is told. In reading Albert Camus' The Plague (1948), for instance, Cloonan argues that allegory, as a literary device, fails because it deals in generalities. For example, in The Plague, rats represent Nazis, while human characters represent communists and Gaullist forces, which alternatively battle the rats and each other. The trouble with allegory is that, while it does relate the problem at hand, it does not suggest any alternative to the way things are, says Cloonan.

The inability of such accomplished artists to write effectively on the war is not because they were failed writers-that much is clear by virtue of their being studied still today-but because their approaches to literature and their sense of what constituted art were formed in a pre-war intellectual climate. Also, the sheer magnitude of the tragedy, in fact, left some of the greatest writers of the time figuratively speechless. The authors' "intellectual and artistic formation came before the war," explains Cloonan. "When they tried to write about World War II, they were so determined by their respective intellectual traditions that were already in place, that they couldn't understand how World War II was unique and different."

On the other hand, Cloonan points to works such as Günter Grass's The Tin Drum, published in 1959, as a successful examination of the war. This penetrating look at the horror of Nazi Germany, like the best literature to come out of the post-World War II period, "engages in a constant reflection on the meaning and limitations of art in the modern world," Cloonan writes.

The cover of Cloonan's book perfectly illustrates the author's argument for the replacement of the old with the new, a fresh worldview that allowed the artists to wrap their minds around the events of the Holocaust and hold on for dear life. The photograph shows three men, victims of the war's destruction but oblivious to the violence of the world around them, picking their way among the rubble as they peruse the stacks of a bombed-out library.

Two groups that were successful in bringing about the transformation in literature did so in two entirely different ways. A cadre of German writers who called themselves "Group 47" associated their own writing with the spare and straightforward style of America's Ernest Hemingway and tried to make the experiences of the war accessible to the reader.

Writers associated with the so-called "New French" novel movement, on the other hand, wrote primarily for academics and intellectuals, and their work was relatively inaccessible to the layperson who wanted to understand the consequences of the war on Europe's future.

The raison d'etre for both groups, despite their relative successes and failures and their different angles of perception, was the realization that the literature of the past was lost along with countless lives at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Birkenau, Belsen, Buchenwald and the other charnel houses of the Nazi regime. Nevertheless, both groups represented the first effort to rethink literature in a post-war context, says Cloonan.

As a comment on how American literature changed after the war, Cloonan acknowledges the love/hate attitude that American writers have toward French literary criticism. French theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Helene Cixous, and Jean Baudrillard introduced Americans to theories of literature that to some scholars were both profound and progressive, while at the same time were incomprehensible to those untrained in philosophy. Such hesitation toward breaking from the old ways of thinking, says Cloonan, "is an American problem, not a French one," and the American response, despite its vocal condemnation of the events of the Final Solution and its dedication to organizing Holocaust memorials and archives, remains cloudy.

Even a recent upswell of media attention on the Holocaust-most notably through the films of Steven Spielberg and the work of his Shoah Foundation, headed by FSU alumnus Michael Berenbaum-has had relatively little impact on American letters, says Cloonan. The reason is simple, he believes.

"World War II was not fought on the American mainland. [That] greatly affected the American way of writing about it."

Too, as the war slides further into history, the events of the early 1940s are losing impact on public consciousness because so few are left who experienced the butchery firsthand. In America, the men and women victims of Nazi atrocities, along with veterans, are reportedly dying at the rate of 1,000 a day. Their memories very often die with them. Thus, for American writers, the temptation is great to neatly package the Final Solution for consumption by a society hungry for easily digested history.

"Few things are naturally conducive to bad art as mass murder, rape, and clearly defined good guys and bad guys," says Cloonan. "I doubt any human experience can escape exploitation and the Final Solution is no exception."

Berenbaum, also former director of research at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., understands the importance of making the lessons of the Holocaust applicable to our future as well as our past. He writes that when the United States Memorial Council considered how it would relate the story of the Final Solution to Americans, the group realized that "the story had to be told in such a way that it would resonate not only with the survivor in New York and his children in San Francisco, but with a black leader from Atlanta, a midwestern farmer, or a northeastern industrialist."

Much of Americans' understanding of exactly what happened in the Holocaust comes from the access that the war's literature offers to the events. The gritty war fiction of Norman Mailer, James Jones, and a host of American writers of war fiction (e.g. William Styron, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut) and filmmakers intent on preserving the war's legacy looked to the European artists who not only lived through the war, but have had to cope with its aftermath.

And it is the aftermath, after all, that must concern us now, argues Cloonan. So monstrous were the war's images and its impact on humanity, it has taken us nearly 60 years to identify those few written words that adequately deal with the defining episode of the 20th century, and put into chilling perspective what the next one may bring.

"Grass Succeeded because he has been less impressed by moral issues than the fact that, in his words, 'the air had a higher lead content than normal.'" -Bill Cloonan

"If Camus was the resolute optimist of the time, Sartre was the resolute pessimist. His writing failed to convey the full horror of the war because he couldn't understand how this war was different from any other." -Bill Cloonan