Coming to an End: The Narrative of Holocaust Autobiographies and Memoirs

The paper explains the capacity of narrative to represent memoirs of the Holocaust with its unbelievably horrible pretexts and conditions. Even though narrative might not be sufficient to represent the Holocaust, Holocaust authors nonetheless employ it, selecting various genres as the means for relating their personal experiences of large-scale devastations. The paper points to several anxieties about representing the Holocaust, including the urgent need to pass on its details, complexities, moral lessons, and questions about the author's ability to convey its horrors. The paper investigates such anxieties in several memoirs, such as Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood (1976), Jean Amery's At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor and Its Realities (1980), Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz (1958), and Elie Wiesel's Night (1963). The paper argues that these memoirs chronicle the circumstances and conditions of the individual writing the text, and represent the shared, collective experiences of persons, fellow captives in a death camp, and family members and friends. Wolf's Patterns, for instance, reflects implicit assumptions about memoirs as a cultural apparatus that assimilates and disseminates historical events, ethical imperatives, human trauma, and moral catastrophe. Holocaust authors find a difficulty of coming to a resolution in their narratives because of the complicated and unbelievable events of the Holocaust and because they foreclose the past and disjoin it from the present. However, the paper concludes, Holocaust narratives succeed in presenting the actuality of their life and selves to a general constituency