2024/01/01 by Helen Finch · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Contemporary Literature and Criticism
paper · doi:10.1093/hgs/dcae038
openalex publication_date 2024/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
In the past few months, it has become particularly difficult to debate the responsibility of witnesses to atrocity and to compare the legacy of the genocide of European Jewry—the Holocaust—to the legacy of other atrocities, especially those taking place outside Europe. From the German “New Historians’ Debate” in 2021 that centered around the work of Achille Mbembe, and the German debate around whether comparative debates about the Holocaust are necessarily antisemitic, to the difficult conversations about suffering and guilt since the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, and the ensuing war and humanitarian disaster in Gaza, the politics of comparison have become polemical and emotional territory. Syd (formerly Rachel) Zolf’s No One’s Witness, written and published during the COVID-19 lockdown, slightly precedes these debates and proposes a moving, rigorous, and poetic alternative to them. Zolf suggests that the fraught and politicized questions of relationality can be thought through using Paul Celan’s poetry and the work of a series of artists and writers committed to thinking beyond the bounds of the sovereign individual and the individual traumatic event. No One’s Witness engages the last three lines of Celan’s poem Aschenglorie—Niemand/zeugt/für den Zeugen (Ashglory—No one/bears witness for the/witness [Pierre Joris’s translation]) to think through a poetics and ethics of witnessing from the position of “No One.” Each chapter takes as its title one word or phrase from these lines. Zolf thinks through each chapter title in relation to an area of related philosophical concern and also in relation to a study of artwork that resonates with Celan’s words.