Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human SpiritVersions of Survival focuses on the efforts to rehabilitate the human image after it has been tempered in the crucible of the Holocaust. It examines the ways in which psychology, language, and literary art distort or illuminate that effort. It insists on the importance of confronting the inhuman, to say nothing of the unthinkable, when probing survival during the Holocaust and the sources of man's moral being. The book assesses and challenges some of the more comfortable and comforting conclusions about the survival experience as set forth by Bruno Bettelheim, Viktor Frankl, and Terrence Des Pres. It analyses material that contradicts or modifies their survival theories such as Hermann Langbein's Menschen in Auschwitz, Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, and Tadeusz Borowski's stories This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Langer then evaluates the career and work of Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor who has devoted his life to forging an image of the human compatible with the anguish that the survivor-victim of the Holocaust endured. Finally, the author examines the fate of language, of the work itself, as it succumbs to atrocity and then is reshaped into a new and vigorous if enigmatic force by the hand and imagination of two survivor poets, Gertrud Kolmar and Nelly Sachs. |
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Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit Lawrence L. Langer No preview available - 1982 |
Common terms and phrases
accept acknowledge alive annihilation atrocity attitude Auschwitz become begins behavior Bettelheim body called camp celebrate choice concentration confrontation continues dead death deathcamps depends describe destiny determined dignity dying escape event existence experience expression extermination face fact fate feeling final forced Frankl future gas chamber gesture heart Holocaust hope human idea imagination impossible individual inner Jewish Jews kind Kolmar language later less living man's meaning memory mind moral narrator nature Nazi Nelly Sachs never night normal offers once one's ordeal pain past perhaps physical poem possible Pres present principle prisoners question reader reality remain resistance response says seems sense silence situation speak spiritual story suffering survival survivor traditional truth turned understand universe values verbal victims vision vocabulary voice Wiesel writing