This semester, I am teaching a Holocaust Literature class. Today, we spent a good deal of our time in class discussing what responsibility writers have, if any, to be accurate in how they represent the events of the Holocaust.
Should We Hold Writers Accountable?
So far, the class has read Deborah Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel’s Night, and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, so the question of truthfulness isn’t one that we’ve had to tackled directly in relation to our target texts. Or rather, we’ve discussed things like how a person remembers, the challenges of memoirs and life writings when it comes to truthfulness and accurate representation. But we haven’t really touched on the question of historical accuracy.
Both Wiesel and Levi are Holocaust survivors and discuss their experiences at a historical distance, but with an obvious effort to recall details relevant to the narratives they construct. Wiesel weaves various threats through his narrative about his relationship with his father, for instance, and how that changed over the course of his time at Auschwitz. Levi concentrates more on describing the various aspects of his experience that stood out. He mentions in the preface to the book that he was writing mostly for himself.
Lipstadt, so far the odd one out, recounts not a history of the Holocaust, but of Holocaust denial and its rise within the US and around the world. She describes the origins of Holocaust denial and its relationship to antisemitism. Because she is challenging those who have distorted history to facilitate Holocaust denial, she is meticulous with her research, providing extensive endnotes so that interested readers can verify her sources.
In the coming weeks, though, my class is going to explore different fictional accounts of the Holocaust, including, for example, Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl. We are also going to discuss Holocaust films as literature, and grapple with the problem of inaccurate representations, such as The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.
The Stakes of Historical Fiction
Today, in fact, we had a bit of a preemptive discussion about what is at stake with representations like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Does it even matter that popular representations of the Holocaust are inaccurate? How much inaccuracy is a problem? What even constitutes inaccuracy when we’re talking about trauma-impacted memory?
It’s no secret among my students (including those in my Holocaust literature class) that my favorite writers, including the likes of George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and, of late, Kenneth Lonergan, are meticulous researchers. Attention to detail is something that they all have in common. If I think about other works of literature that I really enjoy, whether texts, films, or television shows, what makes the difference is always attention to detail, both in terms of content and writing style. Absence of such attention, to me, seems sloppy. And sloppy writing, sloppy productions, are irritating.
For Holocaust literature, though, sloppy writing and sloppy research has serious consequences. My class spent the first two weeks of the semester reading Lipstadt’s study of how Holocaust denial has grown over the decades since the event itself and it has provided a justification for antisemitism and a whole host of other heinous activities by radical groups around the US and other parts of the world.
In answer to my principal question, then, the answer is a resounding yes with respect to historical fiction. If a writer is essentially making up a history for the purpose of (at least in part) entertainment purposes, with an agenda to formulate a creative work that engages readers through its aesthetic qualities and storytelling, then there should be standards for representation. While it is okay, I think, to play with the definition of reality, to allow that a character might not see things accurately (I was having a related discussion about this with regard to Jane Austen the other day), it is unacceptable to have inaccurate representations of historical situations for no more substantial reason than that the writer did insufficient research.
For some important insights about The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which happens to be my test case at the moment, checkout this article discussing what his wrong with the book and this one from the Holocaust Center North about problems with the book and its (surprisingly?) enduring popularity among history teachers.
If you enjoy discussing problems like this, consider joining one of our ongoing book groups!