The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust

In this series of interlinked essays, Geoffrey Hartman draws upon his pioneering interests in the collection of Holocaust survivor video testimony and his personal experience as a child of the Kindertransport to explore life and culture, meaning, and memory in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Taking up the anguished question of many survivors, “has the world learned anything?”, Hartman discusses issues of representation and ethics, the relations between first- and second-generation witnesses to the events, and how artists, scholars, and teachers have represented and transmitted these extreme experiences. How, he asks, do we convert our knowledge about the Holocaust into a thoughtful and potent understanding? Writing with his characteristic intelligence and grace, Hartman takes us from Bitburg to “Schindler’s List”, from Vichy to battles over public memory. He also evokes his experience as a refugee in England in vivid detail and explains how as a writer on literature and culture he came gradually to focus on the Holocaust.