[The Holocaust- A Genocide In History]

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History of the Holocaust

Introduction

In 1981, D.M. Thomas published The White Hotel, a novel whose main character, Lisa Erdman, is a victim of the Babi Yar massacre in Ukraine. Upon publication Thomas' novel was thrust into the national spotlight under allegations of pseudo-plagiarism. In the Times Literary Supplement, "letter writer D. A. Kenrick called readers attention to the rather pronounced debt … The White Hotel owed to Anatoli Kuznetsov's 'document in the form of a novel,' Babi Yar," and questions Thomas' choice of subject, asking whether "[an] author of a fiction [should] choose as his proper subject events which are not only outside his own experience but also, evidently, beyond his own resources of imaginative re-creation" (Young 2008 53 - 54).

James E. Young, in his book Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, explicates the issue, pointing to the "resemblances" between the two narratives. Young concludes that Thomas was motivated, as was Kuznetsov-who "based [his own novel] upon the remembrances of the Babi Yar survivor Dina Pronicheva"-by the belief that "[he had] neither the right nor the requisite experience to imagine such suffering" . The controversy surrounding the novel and Young's response to it raise important questions about the literary (re)production of narratives of genocide. Thomas, although motivated by a desire to preserve historical authenticity, was criticized for his appropriation of survivor experience. Thomas' experience suggests a common belief that a literary representation of genocide should not appropriate testimony, as this lessens the truth claim made in the testimony itself. I cite the White Hotel incident in order to make an analogy to another work of literary reproduction of testimony. In his 1963 novel V., Thomas Pynchon uses direct testimony, from both victims and independent witnesses, to construct a narrative of the genocide of the Herero in German South-West Africa.

Further, in this narrative he traces a historical lineage of genocide within Germany, through the image of the Holocaust. As it turns out, Pynchon's use of the Herero uprising in German South-West Africa was entirely by chance. In a 1969 letter to Thomas F. Hirsch, a graduate student researching the Bondelswaartz uprising, Pynchon describes his discovery of the Herero material; he "was looking for a report on Malta [to use for other chapters of V.] And happened to find the Bondelswaartz one right next to it" (Seed 1998 240). Pynchon's relatively early discovery and subsequent narrativization of the Herero genocide is all the more remarkable in light of the historical scholarship on the event available up to that ...