14 The Holocaust and the Challenges of Representation MICHAEL ROTHBERG As the German invasion of Poland reached Warsaw, Chaim Kaplan famously wrote in his diary, “It is beyond my pen to describe the destruction.” 1 With that phrase, Kaplan unwittingly helped inaugurate a tradition of thinking about the representation of the Nazi genocide of European Jews that continues to this day. It remains a widely held view – among both scholars and members of the public – that the Holocaust outstrips reality and defies literary and artistic depiction. As Lawrence Langer wrote in one of the first book-length studies of Holocaust literature, “[B]efore 1939 imagination was always in advance of reality, but after 1945 reality had outdistanced the imagination so that nothing the artist conjured could equal in intensity or scope the improbability of l’univers concentrationaire.” 2 While seeming to forecast the perspective offered by Langer, Kaplan had not yet actually encountered the concentrationary universe when he wrote those memorable words lamenting his own limits as a writer. Although he responded to events with a foresight about the fate of Polish Jews that, especially in retrospect, is remarkable, he was responding on 12 September 1939 not to genocide, but to war; and he was responding not primarily as a Jew, but as a Pole. As the full passage reads: “It is beyond my pen to describe the destruction and ruin that the enemy’s planes have wrought on our lovely capital. Entire blocks have been turned into ashes and magnificent palaces into rubble. Every incendiary bomb dropped in the stillness of the night brings havoc and death to hundreds of people. Dante’s description of the Inferno is mild compared to the inferno raging in the streets of Warsaw.” 3 The problem of representation Kaplan was invoking was not yet a matter of 1 A. I. Katsh (ed.), Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan (New York, Collier, 1981), p. 29. 2 Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, p. 35, cited in Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, p. 194 n. 4. 3 Katsh (ed.), Scroll of Agony, p. 29. 332 available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108990172.016 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. UCLA Library, on 26 May 2025 at 12:31:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,