Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Suny Series in Modern Jewish Literature & Culture) - Hardcover

Lawrence L. Langer

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0873955838 ISBN 13: 9780873955836

Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr, 1982

Synopsis

Analyzes the theories concerning why certain people survived the Nazi concentration camps and examines the writings of survivors

About this title

Review:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr
• Publication date: 1982
• ISBN 10: 0873955838
• ISBN 13: 9780873955836
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280