CRITICAL RESPONSE: I

Spring 2002
Volume 28, Number 3

Excerpt from
A Response to Shoshana Felman
by Marianna Torgovnick

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In "Theatres of Justice," Shoshana Felman calls the Eichmann trial "a living powerful event--an event whose impact is É 'not the same for all'" (Shoshana Felman, "Theatres of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust," Critical Inquiry 27 [Winter 2001]: 210). Having recently spent time with the substantial archive that surrounds the trial--both printed and filmed-- I feel the need to supplement some of Felman's points and to question others on what I take to be the main thrust of Felman's essay: narrative and the "authorship of history" (p. 230).

Survivor testimony at the Eichmann trial, Felman writes, shows how "A Jewish past that formerly had meant only a crippling disability was now being reclaimed as an empowering and proudly shared political and moral identity." It forms a "newborn sacred narrative" (pp. 233, 236Ð37). The vocabulary used in these sections of the essay troubles me. It suggests "empowerment and proudly shared political and moral identity" and "crippling disability" as two alternatives Ð neither of which seems appropriate to the legacy of the Holocaust. The diction tilts the trajectory of Felman's essay close to what Peter Novick calls the sacralization of the Holocaust as the central point of modern Jewish identity.1 In such rhetoric, Mauthausen becomes "sacred" (as it did, in a recent controversy over a benefit concert scheduled to be staged there) and Auschwitz can be called "the Holy of Holies" (as it was in the recent documentary, Mr. Death). Such language jars on the imagination and on the intellect.

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In the transcripts and the extensive footage shot in Court, the Judges struggle to tailor judicial language that acknowledges the emotional weight of survivor testimony without injustice to the Accused. At the beginning of the long Judgment (some 136 pages), the Judges note that, "Without a doubt, the testimony given at this trial by survivors of the Holocaust, who poured out their hearts as they stood in the witness box, will provide valuable material for research workers and historians, but as far as this Court is concerned, they are to be regarded as by-products of the trial" (T, 5:2083).9 They then proceed to cite individual witnesses by name at specific points when witness testimony bore directly on Eichmann. But the most creative of the Judge's actions was to evolve the concept of the Final Solution not as a set of discrete events but as a continuous action that we have come to call the Holocaust. Hitler's order for the Final Solution, they wrote, "was not an order to exterminate first one million Jews and later another million, and so on." Instead, "the order was one comprehensive order, and the desire of the main conspirators and perpetrators was identical with the original originator--general and totalÉ.Hence everyone who acted in the extermination of Jews, knowing about the plan for the Final Solution and its advancement, is to be regarded as an accomplice in the annihilation of the millions" (T, 5:2186). In sentencing Eichmann, the Judges similarly found a way to make the basis for the sentence concrete, a way grounded in the survivor testimony as a whole. "For the dispatch of each train by the accused to Auschwitz, or to any extermination site, carrying one thousand human beings," they wrote, "meant that the accused was a direct accomplice in a thousand premeditated acts of murder, and the degree of his legal and moral responsibility is not one iota less than the responsibility of the person who with his own hands pushed these human beings into the gas chambers" (T, 5:2218). Neither silent nor reticent, the Judges acknowledge survivor testimony at the trial and assume "authorship of history" without recourse to the "sacred," let alone to "myths" or folktale.

1. See Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York, 1999), p. 11.

9. In addition to the factors I note, the judges also creatively rewrote the prosecution's charges to acknowledge ambiguities in the historical record (for example, about how to date the inception of the Final Solution). Arendt complains that the judges oversimplified Eichmann's posture at the trial by calling him simply a "liar." But considering the magnitude of the information the Judges had to process and assimilate, the judgment forms a remarkable document.