Eva Hoffman opens her new book—After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust, published this month by PublicAffairs—by contemplating a paradox. Writing about the Holocaust, she notes: "as this immense catastrophe recedes from us in time, our preoccupation with it seems only to increase." Even as we routinely speak of the "memory" of the Holocaust, most people today "do not have memories of the Shoah."
Like all of Hoffman's nonfiction—Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), Exit into History: A Journey into the New Eastern Europe (1993), and Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (1997)—After Such Knowledge deals with memory. But while those highly praised earlier books were investigations into how we understand the past, her new book is more complex, for here she has decided to tackle a far more vexing question: not simply of the nature of memory, but how memory has the potential to make us misunderstand or misapprehend the past. The questions Hoffman raises here may be, in many ways, a turning point in how, as a culture, we understand and discuss not just the Holocaust but the nature of historical trauma.
Like her earlier work—particularly Lost in Translation, which detailed Hoffman's emigration from Cracow, Poland, to Vancouver, Canada, in 1959 at the age of 13, and Exit into History, a record of her travels back to a contemporary Poland and Eastern Europe, places that existed so vividly in the memory of her postwar childhood—After Such Knowledge expertly mixes the personal with a widely ranging mix of historical fact and theoretical speculation. Much as her early books did, Hoffman's new work shocks us—not simply because she is an audacious, provocative thinker, but because she has that rare ability to link the most intimate, honest autobiographical detail to a vigorous intellectual investigation of her subject. This dazzling blend of the personal and the political, unsettling sentiment and unyielding cultural examination marks Hoffman's book—and her earlier work—as groundbreaking.
PW caught up with Hoffman in her home in London, where she was on break from her appointment as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. All of Hoffman's work is written in the shadow of the Holocaust, and she is acutely aware that her books are part of a larger cultural trend: what she refers to as a "preoccupation" with the Holocaust.
"I think this preoccupation with the Holocaust started in the 1980s, but peaked in the 1990s," Hoffman begins in a lilting, slightly accented voice that moves slowly as she chooses her words carefully. "I suspect that the Holocaust became, in a sense, a far safer subject to approach from a distance. That makes sense. Remember that there was a long latency period after the war in which there was a kind of obliviousness and forgetfulness, I would even say a suppression and possibly repression about what had happened. This led to an urge, really a general realization, that the Holocaust was a monumental event that needed to be reckoned with.
"But something else was also present than as well. I believe that the geopolitical changes of 1989 [the fall of the Berlin Wall] also greatly informed this situation. These were substantial changes. The big ideological framework, the metanarratives that we tell our selves about our history, all of a sudden evaporated. There was a tremendous return to the past, to thinking about the past. And, of course, there was this enormous past which needed to be addressed. We needed to find a way to do that, and memory was very important. This is really the background for how we have been thinking about the Holocaust."
Hoffman pauses. "But at that point we were very remote from the Holocaust and for many of the people for whom it was a preoccupation, it was not a personal history; there was no personal relationship to it. I think this is where the entire question of memory becomes important in thinking and writing about the Holocaust. Memory is a marker, a mediator, of a not very direct relationship to the event. It is a way to connect us to it. Of course, it is very difficult to know which is the chicken or the egg, or the cart and the horse. Did questions of memory became so prominent partly because of this new interest in the Holocaust, or did the preoccupation with the Holocaust arise because we were now more concerned with the idea of memory? This return to the past becomes, I think, more evident as the present becomes, well, more confusing."
And confusion with the present—and a desire to deal with this disorientation by returning to the past—is a theme that moves throughout After Such Knowledge. Thinking about the idea of trauma and memory, PW mentions to Hoffman that the mid-to-late-1980s was also a time, in the therapeutic world, where we saw an enormous preoccupation—to use her word—with repressed memory and childhood sexual abuse. "Yes, absolutely. This happened at exactly the same moment. We became fixated on questions of memory and the reliability of memory. And of course it came also with a tremendous explosion in the therapeutic culture and the very legitimate interest in questions of trauma after Vietnam. And with this was a tremendous emphasis on victimology, both personal victimization and collective victimization as well."
One of the profound pleasures of Hoffman's work, and After Such Knowledge in particular, is her ability to carefully stake out new, intellectually risky ground. As she tentatively answered questions—making sure that she was precise about such important topics—PW became just as tentative with questions. Was Hoffman implying that the "memory" of the Holocaust was not a useful thing? Carefully, she explained, "From the distance that we stood from the Holocaust, and from which American Jewry stood from the Holocaust, the insistence on memory, while maybe fueled by a genuine impulse to struggle with this, became very formulaic. In other words: What were we remembering? Were we in fact remembering? Whose memories were they? I think often that the formula, let's say the rhetoric, of memory often substituted for a more genuine and a more arduous wrestling with history itself."
Can this rhetoric of memory lead to a misunderstanding of factual history about the Holocaust, or even be problematic for people who are grappling with their identity in relationship to this history? "Well, I certainly felt that there were certain distortions in how people were viewing the historical record. But I want to be very careful in how one looks at and interprets this. Because one of the things that came out for me from the writing of this book was a greater sympathy for the genuine need to come to terms with the Holocaust, even if one does not have a personal relationship to it. These are very genuine impulses and needs, moral urges that people have. But I think there is also a danger of distortion. First of all, one doesn't really have enough knowledge to justify the deep degree of, let's say, empathy for the victims of the Holocaust. There is also the danger of feeling that one is entitled to the moral legacy of this history, and of being on the side of the angels without actually having such entitlement. So, yes, I do think there are dangers of distortions, and that is one of the reasons I decided to write on this topic."
If memory is one of the important skeins that run through the tapestry of After Such Knowledge, another is the idea of how all identity is constructed by our histories and society. "Of course identity is socially constructed. My parents, for instance, didn't see themselves as 'survivors'—even through they lived through the Holocaust—it is not a term they would have used. They began using it a little bit very late on, because it was in the air. But initially, and for quite a long time, they understood their circumstances in quite particular terms and textures." Hoffman also writes, in After Such Knowledge, about how the idea of the "second generation" is also a constructed identity, one which has been written about extensively. It is, she writes, "an imagined community" (a phase coined by sociologist Benedict Andersen) with no geographic parameters. In many ways, such ideas as "Holocaust survivor" and "second generation" have been key concepts in how we have culturally and politically defined these events. But as vibrant as these self-embraced identities are to people, the idea of them being socially constructed raises an interesting question: Would we view the Holocaust in very different ways if these identities had never come into existence?
"These are very delicate questions. I think there is a very internal balance one needs to strike. If that identity had not come into being, I think people will have wrestled with their experience on their own. Perhaps sometimes in very genuine and authentic ways. I would have understood my history as being a history determined by my particular parents. I think that having a kind of privacy of one's own experience does enable one to see that experience in more nuanced, more immediate ways." And once again, Hoffman pauses, in her reflexive response to deeply consider all aspects of her thinking before she continues. "At the same time, I think there is no question that it was helpful to have the public recognition of these events. Survivors felt less alone, and they felt that their experience was not just something that people wanted to turn away from, but was important, very significant. But I suspect that having the public recognition of the events and the experiences was far more important than having it for the identities. With these identities, we begin to talk about things that are too reified, too solidified, too uniformly defined. And there is a danger that people—relying too heavily on this constructed identity—may begin to lose their immediate, personal relationship to their experience by relying on categories."
Hoffman's carefulness is understandable. To begin to question the concepts of how we have constructed personal identities in relationship to the Holocaust will be, for many readers, precarious territory. As human beings, we like to have safe, clearly defined, even at times regimented categories. To imply—as Hoffman does—that these categories, while politically and socially useful, may limit access to personal experience is to reframe a decades-old public discourse about the Holocaust. And to suggest that we might begin to really interrogate the idea of "memory" in relationship to the Holocaust is equally bold, and even disorienting. Memory, Hoffman understands, is a way of thinking that allows us access to the past, but also limits us and prevents us from seeing the full scope of history.
In a courageous move at the end of After Such Knowledge, she writes, "[T]he era of memory is ending," and she postulates that the past 55 years of postwar prosperity and relative calm—bracketed by the end of the Holocaust and the attack on the World Trade Center—are over and that we are facing a reentry into "immediate history—if history is defined by conflict and violent change." Hoffman's brave and intrepid vision comes through, here, in the book's final chapters, for After Such Knowledge does not simply reevaluate how we think about the Holocaust, but how we conceptualize history as well. Her deft blending of personal experience and theory can startle us, and even make us uncomfortable as she refuses to fit her life and thinking into the neat categories to which we have become accustomed. "It was a very difficult book to write," she says. "I was addressing head-on this very painful trend of the past. I was dealing with very important matters of identities, of my relationships to my parents and a series of confluences of internal and external politics and feelings. But I did feel the need to do it."
Does she expect criticism, since After Such Knowledge goes against much of how we have learned to think about the Holocaust? "I think it may be controversial," she begins, with her usual modesty. "I hope it is interesting to people. But I think we may be entering yet another stage of thinking about our relationship with the past." On the last pages of After Such Knowledge Hoffman writes, "[I]t is necessary to separate the past from the present and to judge the present in its own light... that moment of separation, of letting go, is a poignant one, for it is akin to the giving up of mourning." This is a process that perhaps is hindered by memory, and one Hoffman has explicated beautifully.
