More than anyone, Wiesel helped sacralize the Holocaust, making it a kind of theological event that stood outside history. ‘The ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted,’ was how he once put it. [...]
Primo Levi had a special dislike for Wiesel’s ways and means, which makes Wiesel’s infamous verdict on Levi’s suicide (“Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later”) all the more grating.
Decades ago, in a scorching essay, ‘Resistance to the Holocaust,’ Philip Lopate caught the measure of the man: ‘Sometimes it seems that “the Holocaust” is a corporation headed by Elie Wiesel, who defends his patents with articles in the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday Times.'” [...]
After I was accused on another thread of being insensitive to the claims of survivors, to how a survivor chooses to represent himself and his experience, to how my position only reflects the fact that I was not There nor even near There, I followed up with this statement from the Nobel Prize–winning author Imre Kertész, who was a survivor (he died earlier this year), from his essay “Who Owns Auschwitz?”:
I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life (whether in the private sphere or on the level of ‘civilization’ as such) and the very possibility of the Holocaust. Here I have in mind those representations that seek to establish the Holocaust once and for all as something foreign to human nature; that seek to drive the Holocaust out of the realm of human experience.
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