Concentration camp: Beyond the tragic paradigm
One of the most important thing about the experience of concentration camps, and the litterature that describes this experience is what one cannot but refer to as a “beyond of the tragic paradigm”. This point has already been made by Giorgio Agamben:
“Nothing is further from Auschwitz than this model [of the tragic]. For the deportee sees such a widening of the abyss between subjective innocence and objective guilt, between what he did do and what he could feel responsible for, that he cannot assume responsibility for any of his actions. With an inversion that borders on parody, he feels innocent precisely for that which the tragic hero feels guilty, and guilty exactly for what the tragic hero feels innocent.” (Agamben, 97).
But Agamben fails to give concrete examples. I will therefore give one from hungarian noble prize winner Imre Kertész, Fateless (1975). The use of literary examples has always been a contested site in discussion of testimony. On the one hand, it is very important that there is authenticity, that the testimony is not simply invented, nor should the horrors serve to aesthetize the situation. We would also feel ill-at-ease with a Kantian judgment of disinterestedness of the aesthetic object. On the other, it is a fact, that the literary accounts of the camps did provide new aesthetic possibilities, or perhaps more precise: even needed new literary genre. Elie Wiesel said, that just as antiquity had different genres, epic, tragic, the 20th century invented a new genre, which was that of testimony. This is often seen as providing new ethical coordinates along with new aesthetic possibilities. However, what is truly unfathomable is not the camp (how could it happen, the scale of victims, impossible to represent). The truly “impossible” is rather for the witness to continue to talk to “live” a life after, and address a public (as all literature does no matter how “singular”). This is where the true enigma lies, and not as in much theory on testimony emphasize on the “impossibility” of representing the victims. It is precisely, as Blanchot says somewhere that one speaks (rather than gives testimony) that is important. Because the camp was designed to kill all subjectivity (eliminate speech). And when one speaks, one is a subject. Hence, speaking is in itself, after the camp, the most defiant and necessary universal and political act.
When the young narrator, 14 years old, is in the concentration camp Zeitz, he meets Bandi Citrom, an older inmate, who has been in the camp much longer and teaches the young narrator about how to survive (in so far as it is possible). Of interest here is how Kertesz’ work undermines the tragic paradigm (which I will define in a second). We can explore this through a song, that Citrom sings while at work:
“Whether at work or during a break, I often heard, and quickly learned from him, his favorite song, which he brought with him from his labor service days in the punishment company: “We clear mines from land in the Uk-raine, / But even there we’re never chicken . . .” was how it began, and I was specially fond of the closing lines, which go: “If a com-rade, a good bud-dy, should be lost, / For those back home our ri-poste / Is: / Come of us what may, / Our dear old home-land, / We’ll not de-ceive you, at any cost.”
The point here is how the song gives Citrom a certain hold, a capacity to survive. Even as they clear mines in Ukraine, and whereby the Germans show the contempt with which they hold them, they can at least sing the song of the homeland (come of us, what may/our dear old home-land/We’ll not deceive you, at any cost). In other words, the homeland comes to function as Citrom’s sublime Cause, that for which he can bear the humiliations. This is also what defines, although in a different context what I call, following Agamben, the tragic paradigm. The tragic paradigm means that certain things befall you which you have no control over. But as is developed in German Idealism, notably, Schelling and Hegel, precisely this “fate” involves a dialectical shift: the tragic hero can transform the will of the Gods into a “thus I willed it” and hence become a tragic figure. By being loyal to his own Cause the tragic hero also becomes sublime, he rises above the fray and the things that befall his mortal body. The tragic paradigm leaves an interior space, something that cannot be touched, and hence you are never truly exposed. It is precisely this interior space that also gives us a sense of the “grandeur” of the desire of the tragic hero. If the hero’s desire was not “tested” during all these misfortunues, misfortunues he has not caused himself, his fidelity to his own desire could not shine through. In this case, it is precisely the suffering that reveals the sublime love for the homeland in this case of Citrom. Had he been able to stay in Hungary, his love for the homeland would be merely ordinary, it would not stand the “test”. By being deported to Ukraine and since the concentration camp, it is precisely there, that the sublime desire of Citrom (for his Cause, the homeland, can reveal itself). Much of the testimonies of survivors is precisely to undermine the conception, after the war, that something like the tragic paradigm was possible. This is for example a paradigm that operates between clear cuts between victim and executioner. In this case the victim, like Citrom can say, “do what you will, torture me, kill me… but I will never betray my homeland!”. This is structurally the same as the point both Schelling and Hegel emphasize, that the individual subject can “take over” the their fate and thus despite being the will of the Gods can display their freedom. Hegel weites, “we must above all eject the false idea they have anything to do with guilt or innocence. The tragic heroes are just as much innocent as guilty.” (Hegel 1975: 1214). and Agamben writes: “what is tragic is, on the contrary, for an apparently innocent subject to assume unconditionally objective guilt.” (96).
This goes against common sense understanding of freedom, where I am free when I can “do what I want”. On the contrary, while his fate is caused by the Gods, nothing could be more humiliating, says Hegel, than to say to a tragic here that he is not responsible for his own fate. It is precisely through turning the external fate into one’s own decision that the tragic hero shows his sublime freedom, it is precisely in this sense, that a space of interiority is left intact. Not so in the concentration camp.
This beyond the tragic is even what indicates a certain modern experience of the camp. It can be summed up thus: “even the tragic dignity can be taken away from you”. Even the inner sanctuary, the interior space of freedom can be taken away from you. Even the sublime Cause can be taken away from you. In this case, Bandi Citrom holds on to the homeland as his sublime thing. But as the young narrator points out, even this homeland betrayed him, hence there’s is no sublime thing. What Citrom holds on to as his “only thing left” (the memory of the homeland) is false one, and hence this shows that tragic paradigm is no longer possible. To speak of the tragic paradigm here, for example of inmates that were able to “survive” through keeping a little bit of humanity intact fails to understand what the concentration camp really is, how radically it breaks down the inmates. This is also illustrated by the young narrator, where the term “Hungarian” (the homeland) leads him to think of when they are deported and just as they are about to be handed over to the S.S. the hungarian gendarme asks them to give him their hidden valuables, since, “after all they are all hungarians” — the hypocricy of this phrase, is of course, that he asks for a moment of “solidarity”, even as he hands over his own country-men to the S.S. for deportation and death. The young narrator tells us about Bandi Citrom’s song:
A noble sentiment, undeniably, and the somber tune, more on the slow side than snappy, along with the ditty as a whole, did not fail to exert their influence on me too, naturally — only somehow they merely jogged my memory of the gendarme, that time back on the train, when he reminded us of our being Hungarian; only in the end, strictly speaking, the homeland had punished them too. I mentioned this to him once, what’s more. He did not come up with any counterargument either, yet he seemed to be just a little put out, even annoyed one could say. On some occasion the next day, though, very wrapped up in something, he again started whistling, humming, and finally singing it as if any recollection of that had been clean forgotten.
When the narrator points out to Citrom that his sublime Thing (the homeland that he will never betray and that enables him to survive), this does not allow for a reality check, he cannot “assume” this knowledge. He gets slightly annoyed, (very far from the tragic grandeur) but then simply falls back into the idea he had before the narrator told him. This characteristic of the being exposed, of not having any “homeland” is a general characteristic of the experience described in the novel. For example, the camp is almost exclusively run by “inmates” (other prisoners) as part of the way that S.S. has organized the camp. The young narrator quickly realizes that there is no “us” against “them”. For example the prisoners that speak yiddish from Latvia regards him as a complete nobody. He also doesn’t speak hebrew, and is hence excluded fromt the jewish groups in the camp. The sense of “solidarity” of a common fate (against the Nazis) fails to take account of how radical the humiliation is.
This blurs the distinction between executioner and victim, which is necessary for the tragic paradigm. It is true, that on the one hand the tragic hero, by taking his fate upon him, also is no longer a purely passive victim, but “bears” his fate, yet this fate at the same time remains something exterior, something that doesn’t essentially “touch” or “besmirch” his dignity and inner freedom. But this is precisely what is undermined in the universe concentrationnaire.
Slavoj Žižek once said in a lecture (online, but I haven’t been able to relocate it) that the only possible description of the concentration camp was comedy (not tragedy). He does describe it in his book on totalitarianism and in several lectures, saying for example that the incommensurability between the “psychological profiles” (such as Eichmann’s banality of evil) and the magnitude of genocide cannot be represented, cannot be illustrated within the same symbolic frame, so that the only way to “represent it” is through a turn to comedy or comical elements. “The way out of the predicament seems to be to turn to comedy which, at least, accepts in advance its failure to render the horror of the holocaust.”
One of the weaknesses of Agamben’s otherwise very fine account is that while it does describe the beyond of the tragic, does not describe how varied the experience of the camp can be and how this is seen through the variety of literary techniques and tropes (such as irony, for example). Kertész can paradoxically only give testimony in so far as he makes use of fiction. There is no “direct” testimony.
It is not that we, readers, laugh, but the structure is more like that of comedy. This is a great and provocative insight, provided that it is understood in a very precise sense. Take again the example of Citrom: the fact that he doesn’t “take in” the information about how Hungary and how there’s no sublime homeland that Citrom can hold on to. In fact, the way he clings to his thing, makes it less sublime, and more in the genre of the comic characters, that cling to their idée fixe. Zupancic has, following Walter Benjamin, also conceptualised this very precisely: the comic character has “ein einziger Zug” (a unary trait). (66).
The narrator continues also about Bandi Citrom:
Another frequently repeated refrain was that he would again “set foot on the pavements of Forget-me-not Road,” that being where he lived back home, and he mentioned the street, even the number of the house, so many times and in so many ways that finally I too knew all its attractions by heart, almost longed to go there myself, even though in my own recollections I actually knew it only as a fairly secluded backstreet somewhere in the neighborhood of the Eastern Railway Terminal. He often spoke about, evoked, and also reminded me of other places too, squares, avenues, houses, as well as certain well-known slogans and advertising signs that blazed on their roofs and in various shopwindows — “the lights of Budapest” as he called them, though here I had to correct him, being obliged to point out that those lights no longer existed on account of the blackout regulations, and the bombing, to be sure, had knocked the city’s panorama about a bit here and there. He fell silent, but as far as I could make out the news was not very much to his liking. The next day, though, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, he again started to go on about the lights. (141).
What we are dealing with here is not tragic dignity, the tragic hero of Hegel or Schelling, but something more in the beyond, of a certain unrealistic “stubbornness” (as the narrator calls it). It is precisely not that of an “inner freedom”, but of a survival strategy where freedom is “outside” the camp, but which prevents the inmate to become a Muselmann:
“But then, could anyone be acquainted with all the variants of stubbornness? For I can assure you, had I but known, there were many variants I could have chosen from I heard about the past, the future, and a lot, a very great deal, about freedom above all; indeed, I can safely say, nowhere does one hear as much about it, it seems, as among prisoners, which naturally makes a lot of sense after all, I suppose. Yet others took some strange pleasure in an adage, a joke, a wisecrack of sorts.” (142).
While comedy is sometimes claimed to be a more “realistic” genre than tragedy, we should not forget that comedy much more often include “unrealistic” components, such as Harpagon talking about his 10.000 ducats, no matter what happens in positive reality. By the same token, Bandi Citrom talks about his homeland as the sublime thing, no matter what the narrator can tell him. Agamben points out “with an inversion that borders on parody, he feels innocent precisely for that which the tragic hero feels guilty, and guilty exactly where the tragic hero feels innocent.” (97). This innocence as a protest is also illustrated in Kertész novel, as as example of what he calls “stubbornness”, he meets a man in the camp that he knew before:
“Do you know what this here,” pointing to his chest, “this letter ‘U’ signifies? Sure, I did, I told him: “Ungar, Hungarian.” “No,” he answered, “Unschuldig”, meaning innocent,” then he gave a snort of laughter by prolonged nodding of the heading with a brooding expression, as if the notion were somehow gratifying, though I have no idea why. Subsequently, and quite often in the beginning, I saw the same on others in the camp from whom I also heard that wisecrack, as if they derived some warming, fortifying emotion from it — that at least is what was suggested by the unfailing identical laugh and then that same softening features, the dolefully smiling and yet somehow euphoric expression with which they told and hailed this witticism each and every time they told it, in much the same sort of way as when a person hears music that deeply touches his feelings or some particularly moving story.” (142–143).
If we look at the narrative strategy, Kertész exemplifies precisely Agamben’s claim in a way not accounted for Agamben himself. He does display, first, the way that Citrom relates to his sublime Thing (the homeland) and then undermines it through the description of the narrator (much the same way he does not himself calls himself innocent but describes the way it actually breaks them down).
He also shows that comical elements are much more pertinent to the description of the camp than tragic dignity (that would allow for interior freedom). Anyone who speaks of tragic dignity of the camp fails to understand how radical the humiliation is.
The comical elements are also shown in Kertész own novel. Particularly through the trope of irony that pervades the whole novel. Yet, Kertész irony, I claim is unlike any other. It testifies through irony. What is “ironic” from us outsiders, such as describing Buchenwald as “beautiful camp”, is not ironic, but truthful within the testimony from “inside”, in comparison to Auschwitz, for example.
Events are recounted with a sort of “peculiar curiosity” as though they cannot be quite true, as though they have a strangeness to them. Most often is used understatement for example. We also find a radical contrast between the shock depicted and the elegant, meandering phrases. Yet, this technique should be understood dialectically: it is precisely this elegance that conveys the shock proper, that can help us move beyond the tragic paradigm. Kertesz’ later in his “autobiography for two voices”, Dossier K. talks of any kind of totalitarian system as “infantile”. In this sense the best way to describe it is also perhaps comedy. The infantilization (say through a young narrator is therefore also the best way to bear testimony to one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century). Perhaps the best response is given by Lubitsz in his movie, to be or not to be, where the joke of a polish actor (playing an SS-officer) says about the concentration camp: “well we do the concentration and the poles do the camping!” — there is something much more precise in this comment, precisely as comedy, than in the “unspeakability” of the camp, in the way that the it operates as a negative sublime, (and especially as a way to support the Israeli State after the war, the ultimate Crime against which all other crimes are “speakable”).
We can understand Kertész singular response by analysing his technique more in detail. Take the following passage, that describes the experience of hunger, how he has changed, although he is not sure when that change came about:
“I would make do with, and even take a certain comfort from, the thought that at least others were eating. Our guards’ lunch was always brought into the factory after them, and I would not take my eyes off them. I have to say, though, that I derived little joy from this as they ate quickly, without even chewing, just bolted it down; I could see they had no idea what they were doing, really. There was another time when I was in a workshop Kommando, and here the workmen unpacked whatever they had brought from home; I recollect watching for a long time — quite possibly, I would have to admit, not entirely without a smidgeon of obscure hope — a yellow hand covered in big warts as it fished long green beans, one after another, out of a tall jar. But that warty hand (by then I had thoroughly familiarized myself with every single one of its warts, every foreseeable grip it might make) just kept on moving, plying the passage between jar and mouth. After a while, though, his back concealed even that from my gaze, since he turned away, which naturally I understood as being out of a sense of decency, though I would have liked to tell him to just take his time, just carry on, as for my own part I set great store on the spectacle alone: that too was better than nothing, in a manner of speaking. (163–164).
Let us break down how the tropes function in order to convey the experience:
1. Understatement (Meiosis)
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Example: “I derived little joy from this…”
The speaker is describing a harrowing and psychologically intense experience (watching others eat while starving) with restrained, almost neutral language. This understatement deepens the emotional impact by refusing overt drama.
2. Irony
Example: “…had no idea what they were doing, really.”
The guards bolt down food in a way that shows ignorance not just of manners but of the grotesque disparity between themselves and the starving prisoners. The irony lies in how the observer, despite his deprivation, becomes the one who “knows better.”
3. Metonymy
Example: “that warty hand (by then I had thoroughly familiarized myself with every single one of its warts…)”
The “warty hand” stands in for the entire person. The speaker’s focus on the hand metonymically conveys obsession, deprivation, and psychological disintegration under starvation.
4. Visual Hyperbole
Example: “thoroughly familiarized myself with every single one of its warts…”
This exaggerated visual attention is hyperbolic: the intense observation expresses the extremity of the speaker’s hunger and the distorted perception of time in the camp.
5. Paralepsis
Example: “…quite possibly, I would have to admit, not entirely without a smidgeon of obscure hope…”
This rhetorical device consists of drawing attention to something while pretending to downplay or deny it. The speaker feigns reluctance to confess the hope that he might get food — or that something might happen — while actually confessing it.
6. Euphemism
Example: “out of a sense of decency…”
The man turns away to eat, and the speaker interprets it euphemistically as “decency,” even though it might just be a desire not to be stared at. The euphemism covers over a potentially more brutal social reality.
7. Periphrasis (Circumlocution)
Example: “plying the passage between jar and mouth”
This ornate, roundabout way of saying “eating” distances the act, allowing the speaker to aestheticize or observe it as a “spectacle,” rather than as simple survival. It’s the language of detachment under extreme conditions.
8. Pathos
The entire scene builds emotional intensity not through overt pity but through slow, detailed, observational narration — creating pathos through accumulation and restraint. By the clear opposition between the “clinical” language and the building of affect, of enjoyment-in-language (as though the speaker also takes enjoyment in his very deliberate phrases).
These literary devices are not a way to “bridge” the experience of the camp to the outside. Instead, they function to show only the diversion. Agamben describes this precisely, through Felman and Laub as the difference between witnessing from the “inside” and the “outside”, both of which are impossible. Shoah is “an event without a witness” (35). Agamben comments:
The Shoah is an event without witnesses in the double sense that it is impossible to bear witness to it from the inside — since no one can bear witness to it from the inside of death, and there is no voice for the disappearance of voice — and from the outside — since the “outsider” is by definition excluded from the event. (35)
The man that eats is an outsider, an outside witness to the concentration camp. The narrator, in the time of narration, is “inside”, but no one can narrate this directly, hence the only way to evoke it is through the literary devices.
This is not a case of “aesthetizing” as Laub and Felman suggests in their reading of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. They suggest that the song in the movie provides a sort of dialogue and a bridge. But as Agamben comments:
The threshold of indistinction between inside and outside (which as we shall see, is anything but a “connection” or a “dialogue” could have led to the comprehension of the structure of testimony; yet it is precisely this threshold that Felman fails to interrogate. Instead of developing her pertinent analysis, the author derives an aesthetic possibility of a logical impossibility through recourse to the metaphor of the song [in Lanzmann’s film]. (36).
But
“to explain the paradox of testimony through the deus ex machina of the song is to aesthetize testimony — something that Lanzmann is careful to avoid. Neither the poem nor the song can intervene to save the impossible testimony; on the contrary, it is testimony, if anything, that founds the possibility of the poem.” (36).
The last point is crucial, also in relation to Kertész, although Agamben does not mention him. It is not that the literary tropes are used to “aesthetize” the logical impossibility (and thereby bridge it). It does not lead to a dialogue between those witnesses outside (such as the Germans) and those inside, (like the jews) after the war. Rather the literary devices function against classical “aesthetization”, they work precisely to underline the impossibility, the tropes are the only way to depict precisely the impossibility, “it founds the possibility of the poem” or of literary speech. For Agamben he therefore talks of a particular lacunae in the testimony, one that is linked to his philosophy of language and the “in-fancy”. The infacy does not mean infantilisation, but directly someone who cannot speak. This means that in Agamben’s model, when we start to speak, there is always something that fades away, something we cannot say, the very possibility of saying is linked to an impossibility, and this becomes particularly visible in testimony.
The relation between language and its existence, between langue and the archive, demands subjectivity as that which, in its very possibility of speech, bears witness to an impossibility of speech. This is why subjectivity appears as witness; this is why it can speak for those who cannot speak.” (146).
The best testimony is therefore one that displays this lacunae. Of course, Agamben’s critics, think that he uses and instrumentalizes concrete historical circumstances, like Auschwitz, to develop a linguistic model that serves his own philosophy. But with that caveat we can still see how Kertèsz is such an “infancy”, and that only the greatest literature can be truly “infant” in this precise way. It must write from within its own lacunae.
This is why we “need” literature, and not simply “witnessing” or “testimony” in the usual sense of anecdotes. We, as Agamben points out, already know all the historical facts about the camps, but the political and ethical significance of the extermination, or even for a human understanding of what happened there — that is, for its contemporary relevance.” (11). What is this contemporary relevance and how does it not speak?
Bibliography:
Agamben, Giorgio. “The Witness and the Archive.” In Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 1999
Hegel, G.W.F. Lectures on Aesthetics, Volume II. Translated by T.M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
Kertész, Imre. Fateless. Translated by Tim Wilkinson. New York: Vintage International, 2004
