Abstract
This abridged English version of Dorothea Heiser’s 1993 German-language collection, Mein Schatten in Dachau, is part of a series of outputs from Stuart Taberner’s ongoing research into the translatability of the Holocaust experience across diverse geopolitical contexts. As those generations with first-hand experience of the camps are passing into history, documents such as these seek not just to preserve the individual voices of those affected, but also to draw lessons from the past that might prevent such atrocities in the future. Accordingly, the volume is oriented towards school and university courses in history, politics and international relations as much as lovers of European literature. It comes with useful biographical notes on each poet, as well as further glossary information on the camp and its subsidiaries, and a bibliography for further reading on both Dachau and the Holocaust more generally.
Although the original German volume shared this basic pedagogical mission, the way it was inserted into its contemporary German context was fundamentally different. In the 1980s and early 1990s, testimony of any kind from victims of the Holocaust was still largely absent in the public sphere. Dorothea Heiser’s project to bring into German, on their own terms, the voices of ten different linguistic experiences of the Dachau concentration camp therefore represented a significant step in diversifying Germany’s wider engagement with its recent past. The fact of being given a German voice that would stand alongside their (linguistically) Russian, Polish, Latvian, French, Italian, Czech, Hungarian, Dutch or English origins gave the victims a profile that could no longer be dismissed as ‘Other’ to the German experience, and instead commanded respect for the enduring power of both literary forms and the human spirit that came out of this adversity. Twenty years on and transposed to the Anglophone context, these testimonies will be read differently. Coming into English at the beginning of the twenty-first century, they are invariably inserted into what has become the globalized discourse of the Holocaust. With the by now ubiquitous knowledge of suffering in the camps, this discourse at times builds as much on the lure of emotional affect as on the pedagogical desire to instruct.
Taberner clearly sets out the growing importance of the 68 poems gathered in this collection as historical documents, but he also asks that they be read ‘as poems’. Reviewing these poems as literary forms is no easy task. They have been translated by an impressive array of translators at quite varying points in their career. Thus when one poem or set of poems stands out, it is difficult to know whether this is as a result of a more experienced translator who could be won for the ‘better’ works: Alistair Noon and David Cooke, for example, whose translations are as haunting and well-formed as the original German- and French-language pieces, and who are themselves published poets. George Szirtes’ pieces also command attention with evocative turns of phrase and cadences – so much so, that one cannot help wondering if they are actually rather more ‘poetic’ renderings than the Hungarian source texts. The bilingual presentation across two pages of course allows a reader conversant with the languages to come to their own conclusions in individual instances. However, if part of the value of this collection is that it makes authentic voices heard in order to learn from the past, it seems both odd to reflect on the shifts that might have happened in translation and odd not to.
Further quandaries befall the reviewer. It is almost impossible to read the volume in one or two sittings, because the subject matter is just too bleak. Even when images are not in themselves a little hackneyed (and, inevitably some of them are – most of the people writing would not have called themselves poets), the recurrent lexis of death, evil and innocent suffering can start to lose its edge when one is 40 poems in. On one level, this is of course the sort of response the volume should be evincing: its overarching aim is to individualize the Holocaust, and it is right that the reader is not allowed any escape into literary abstraction or offered false comforts. However, if we stop reading for any form of literary escapism or aesthetic pleasure, then we probably start reading for historical analysis and/or empathy. On this level, there are some inherent problems. For example, Dachau was an almost exclusively male camp, with the obvious result that the poets here are, with two exceptions, male. Consequently, the Holocaust experience that this volume makes tangible is entirely male: women are often referenced not just as signifiers of the ‘safe’ world of past lives, but also as themselves safe. As part of a wider pedagogical project about the Holocaust, such distortions are misleading.
None of these reflections are to critique the poems themselves, which certainly do provide access to the human cost of one of the twentieth century’s worst genocides, as expressed directly by a wide range of victims and survivors. Rather, they are intended to tease out just some of the meta-questions this volume raises for any student of literature, translation or history. The volume deserves its place on reading lists across a number of disciplines, but it needs a tutor who is fully alert to the interpretive challenge it poses.