by Skylar Couch-Tellefsen

Introduction

“History is not written in stone. The past is constantly revised according to the attitudes of the present” —Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth.

 

History attempts to prescribe an understanding of an event in the past, but history fails to venture into the memories and stories of forgotten voices. Literature, however, seems to respond to the creation of history with vitality; igniting a shift in the reader’s approach to history by focusing on untold stories. Serbian author David Albahari creates a world in his novel Götz and Meyer that reflects an unspoken, silenced history, where absence reveals more truth than any documentation. Our narrator, who remains unnamed through the entire story, is in the process of reconstructing his family tree after the Holocaust, where much of his family has died due to the gas chamber truck, the Saurer, driven by two men named Götz and Meyer. Through the narrator’s exploration of the lost stories of the Holocaust, Albahari frames the story in a way that offsets the temporal notions of fictional, novelistic writing in order to beseech his readers to reconsider how the production of meaning, history, and knowledge come into existence. By employing a deconstructionist method of writing in response to the documents and archives of history, the narrator (and Albahari) calls into question how our current enactment of language and silence can either erase stories or uplift them to prevent the repetition of historical atrocities.

I.

One of the ways Albahari’s Götz and Meyer resist narrative conventions to challenge history is evident in its defiance of form and structure. Reminiscent of other Holocaust writers, such as Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald, Albahari’s defiant structure shines through because of its seemingly disorganized nature. Aside from the title of the overall work, the literary text lacks indicators of sequence, such as chapters, subdivisions, paragraphing, and ellipses. Instead, Albahari frames his narrative without these dominant narrative tools. The end result is thus an upheaval of temporality for both the narrator and the reader in terms of history. As the narrator shifts from present-day events to moments that took place during the Holocaust, the timelines enmesh within his imagination. The lasting effect of the disorientating temporal space within the novel sheds light on Albahari’s recontextualization of the Holocaust in a contemporary sense.

The indistinct temporality captures the traumatic struggles that genocide and oppression pass on through generations by affecting one’s position relative to time and history. Russian thinker Mikhail Bahktin, who coins the term “chronotope” to describe the narrative elements involving time and location, claims that “the chronotope, functioning as the primary means for materializing time in space, emerges as a center for concretizing representation, as a force giving body to the entire novel” (250). Albahari’s narrator exemplifies the traumatic effects of his own displaced chronotope at the sight of his family tree: “therein lies the absurdity of every representation of life, and any representation of reality will never be the same as reality itself” (44). His ignorance regarding his family heritage reveals itself as the driving force of the novel. As such, if the chronotope that Bahktin illustrates assists in the creation of the novel’s form, then the form can be exemplified by the lack of chronotopic elements in the narrator’s family tree. The utter erasure caused to his family by the Holocaust positions the narrator’s story at large, as he reconstructs a seemingly unspoken history. Thus, the disorienting chronotope reflects such disarray and absence within the narrator’s reality, wherein our narrator attempts to fill the gaps. As a result, the novel’s unstable chronotope concretizes not only the loss of stories but also how the form reflects the content produced in both his novel and historical accounts.

In another sense, the disorienting temporality and narrative form of Götz and Meyer apprise the content; Albahari lacks the experience, first-hand account, or definitive stories of his family’s lives lost to the Holocaust in order to then organize the story in a proper orientation. As a result, the lack of sequence indicators is a container that embodies the absence of stories from Holocaust victims. As the narrator pieces together the lost lives of the Jewish Serbians, he continues to find “one more question [he] can’t answer,” to which the woman who knew of his mother’s story claims history is akin to “a big crossword puzzle. For every little square you fill, there are three more empty” (Albahari 61). Imagining the pictorial genre of an ever-growing crossword puzzle in relation to the form of the novel represents how the narrator is seeking a never-ending, complicated web of sources to discover some form of truth about his relatives. The function of a crossword puzzle, to find the placement of words based on a set of hints, is kindred to the narrator’s own journey. The narrator’s retelling of stories depicts the mental labor of reviving a story within a puzzle that gives very few clues.

The nature in which stories are told without an orientation to a consistent chronotope assists in the narrator’s critique of deriving meaning through representation in both the novel and the recorded history of World War II at large. The shortcomings of history that our narrator repeatedly points to through generalized archives and documents characterize the need for preserving memory to reinstitute the loss of stories. Our narrator tells us early on that his relatives “never spoke of their own, or my, Jewish identity [. . .] so what I knew was limited to the most general facts from textbooks, history, films, and works of literature, which didn’t in any way suggest that those facts had anything to do with me” (Albahari 34). Having never been told of his family history, the narrator then must reconstruct it himself. His meta-reflection also points fingers at us, the readers, to reflect on what parts of history are known to us, and what does not get told. Yet still, the narrator refuses to accept such a fact about the representations of history and therefore life; “This is where history has no more to say,” he says and beseeches the readers to “wonder how each of those 9,500 men, women, and children felt when they donned the yellow armband or the six-pointed star, and history begins to crumble and fail” (Albahari 35). These moments early in the novel, amid the narrator’s recollection of why he began seeking out his family’s history, later characterize the various efforts in narration to produce stories and preserve memories of the Holocaust in his imaginative satire of the Holocaust in Serbia.

It is vital to note that Götz and Meyer derive the title characters from the real SS noncommissioned officers in Belgrade during the Holocaust. By using their real names, Albahari creates a link between the world which constitutes the narrator’s reality to the reader’s reality. Without sacrificing the story elements, Albahari’s “Author’s Note” confirms the material is from various archival materials, yet states “a story, however, is never history, and it respects the facts only insofar as those facts suit the story.” Therefore, he determines a degree of separation between reality and fiction. Bakhtin’s work also affirms the linking notion of reality and the world represented through his claim that “out of the actual chronotopes of our world (which serve as the source of representation) emerge the reflected and created chronotopes of the world represented in the work (in the text)” (253). While there is certainly an element of reality that constitutes Götz and Meyer, the more prominent factor of the work is its novelistic, narrative element—yet to dismiss the implications of such an ever-present factual reality within the novel is counter-intuitive.

The employment of narrative and story as a catalyst to produce a text about historical facts in Götz and Meyer brings into question what role narration has in historicity. New Historicists have long theorized on the role of narration in the production of history, but it is theorist Hayden White who posits questions on the form in which historical accounts take place. White poses questions about an author’s method of representing documentary records in a fictional mode of discourse, and what sorts of conditions a narrative has as a container of history (“The Question of Narrative” 4). Albahari’s narrator seemingly answers: “History was, after all, impersonal, at least as a discipline, it couldn’t exist at the level of the individual, because then it would be impossible to grasp” (34). Within the dry, stubborn history that characterizes much of our collective understanding, there is little room for stories in an overly-crowded reiteration of historical events. To this idea, Albahari’s narrator responds in a playful tone and voice.

Weaving in common elements of literary postmodernism, the narrator gives extensive and humorous commentary on the ‘characters’ of the novel, including his Jewish relatives who lived through the holocaust (Adam, especially), Commander Andorfer, and of course, both Götz and Meyer. The satirical mode of writing in Götz and Meyer reflects further theories posited by White: “the advent of the Satirical mode of representation signals a conviction that the world has grown old [. . .] in awareness of its own inadequacy as an image of representation” (Metahistory 10). When using information from documents, the narrator often presents the information with a playful tone despite the seriousness of the event. In one instance, when looking at a German report from June 1942 on “the stability of the gas trucks,” the narrator indicates the writer with clarity with phrases such as “The author’s position” or “those who submitted the report claimed” (Albahari 16). These lines are then greatly juxtaposed by comically dark phrases such as, “[t]his same document is touching in its concern for the welfare of the load, which found itself in the dark in the back of the truck, screaming and banging at the door, and therefore it would be better, the document proposes, that there be a light in the truck” (Albahari 116). In this document, the term ‘load’ of course refers to the Jews who were transported to their death. The ironic use of words characterizes both the document and the author of the document highlighting the failures of historical accounts and necessitating narration. What Albahari does with this playful and satirical style is then to emphasize the importance of telling stories.

By providing satire to the historical records and documents that enforce one meaning, Albahari draws our attention to the unspoken stories of the Holocaust in an effort to provide new meanings. “We’ll be sorry,” the narrator tells his students, “if we ever stop telling stories;” but when his students inquire if life is a story, he responds with “life is the absence of story,” and therefore gives purpose to narration (Albahari 85). His peculiar notion of life highlights why a reshaping of history is necessary because current models of historical production enforce meanings that erase stories. As White puts it, “the narrative figurates the body of events [. . .] and transforms these ‘events’ into intimations of patterns of meaning that any literal representation of them as ‘facts’ could never produce” (“The Question of Narrative” 22). While both Götz and Meyer got the rights over their whole life, history rightfully records them as “the specialists with the special-purpose truck” in which several descriptions of their role during World War II is accurately documented through “telegrams announcing their arrival and departure” (Albahari 15, 122). Because history lacks the first-hand accounts of his relatives or anything that records the horrors that the people of the Holocaust endure, Götz and Meyer’s recorded journeys transporting the victims overwhelm the picture of history that is created. As such, narrators of history prove it is not concerned with the individual’s lives and feelings—only a collective understanding that shows broadly what has happened.

The narrator draws the reader’s attention to the absence of stories on account of the actions made by Götz and Meyer in order to show how people in power, like Götz and Meyer, silence stories and memories. With no written record of the conditions provided by the original sources who experienced the conditions leading to death and no family members who are survivors that wish to speak of these monstrosities, the narrator is then left without memories. As such, Albahari rebuilds the traditional understanding of memories in history by reconstructing what constitutes the meaning of language in different contexts. His deconstructionist approach to writing in tandem with his reconfiguration of the fictional, novelistic form ultimately allows room to generate new meanings.

II.

What makes Götz and Meyer such an innovative novel lies in the method Albahari writes in. Instead of reading into Albahari’s text through a deconstructionist lens, one can derive how Albahari himself implements a deconstructionist approach in his discussion of language and history. Not only does Albahari reconstruct the languages we as readers use to talk about the history and the Holocaust, but he also substantiates the voices lost in a deconstructionist manner. Philosopher Jacques Derrida, the originator of the deconstructionist theory, offers many different layers in which deconstructionist readings of a text can be performed and understood; however, to avoid misinterpretation, the function of deconstruction that I find most accurate comes from Jeffery T. Nealon, who claims,

deconstruction can intervene only by displacing precisely the mode of thinking that leads to deadlocks, by negotiating its way through specific textual impasses and demonstrating that these stalemates arise because of a radical alterity within the supposed monologic categories of traditional thinking (1270).

A key aspect of Albahari’s writing is his ability to intervene with traditional modes of thinking through his form and content, as we have discussed. However, there are many times when Albahari is rather explicit in his deconstructionist writing on history, and in turn, adds nuance to the enactment of language at large.

As the narrator struggles to maintain a grasp on what he has known thus far as reality, he also challenges the use of language to describe and/or represent reality in both the past, present, and future. More specifically, the narrator grows impatient with language’s shortcomings as he reconstructs his family tree, while other times he simply succumbs to the duality of language. In his prose about his distant relative Adam, the narrator notes how “[Adam] could see that there were parallel worlds, that the worlds were created by language, and that it was enough to alter the meaning of several words in order change the existing world into a new one” (Albahari 146). Here, when Adam is listening to Commander Andorfer speak about the Saurer, and Adam starts to understand his German, he also is beginning to understand the difference centralized in power between himself and Andorfer. Derrida’s theory on deconstruction validates how power controls and dictates language in the way that Adam sees it occur in Götz and Meyer; when discussing how the West controls language, he claims “the nonempirical or noncontingent signifier—has necessarily dominated the history of the world during an entire epoch, and has even produced the idea of the world” (8). The key idea of Western philosophical ideology that language/written word (signifier) is said to arise from speech (sign) has limited our thinking to believe that language comes from the world, and never contributes to the world around it. However, based on Adam’s insight, Albahari posits the deconstructionist notion that language indeed can and does change the world around it.

Although the narrator is rather indiscreet in the latter half of his story, early in the novel Albahari looks closely at the construction of words that invent subjectivities within a system of privileges dictated by hierarchical terms of language. For Derrida, writing is meant “to designate not only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription but also the totality of what makes it possible” (9). While Derrida himself theorizes on how language functions under Western notions of philosophy that prioritize speech over the written word, Albahari seemingly exemplifies the ways a written word can express more than the spoken word. As he reads through the documents the narrator notes that “the words Jew and Gypsy were written ‘jew’ and ‘gypsy,’ in lowercase. Inferior people cannot command superior letters” (Albahari 36). By making note of the direct dehumanization of humans within the documents, Albahari is pointing to a larger issue that can’t quite be articulated through speech. To concede with Derrida’s deconstruction theory, Albahari assesses the playing field in which the master of speech determines the subservient one.

Yet still, Jeffery T. Nealon suggests that there are two levels to deconstruction; both of which Albahari deploys in Götz and Meyer. The first level would involve identifying a presence—the language with supreme value—and the absence, which is the lack of that presence being identified. The deconstructionist would then focus on what is not being said, “leaving nonpresence as a structuring principle of presence and calling into question the privilege of the master term over the subservient one” (Nealon 1269). Albahari’s narrator derives meaning from absence; from history’s enforcement of a narrative that erases the lives of his Jewish heritage. “Some things never can be grasped, and perhaps it is better that they stay that way, meaninglessness being their only meaning,” states the narrator in an effort to cope with the overwhelming reiteration of history that renders him and his family subservient and meaningless (Albahari 90). Albahari’s treatment of the archives and document records thus reinforces the idea that a ‘presence’ exists in knowledge and history that does not accurately account for the loss of meaning in his own life. As such, a new meaning must be preserved.

Nevertheless, Albahari’s narrator doesn’t settle for the meaninglessness of his own life to characterize the overall meaning. Instead, the narrator hints at how meaninglessness “forges a new meaning, crystal clear” to base one’s conceptualization of life’s meaning around (Albahari 90). He welcomes what Nealon posits to be “the wholesale displacement of the systematics of binary opposition and the reinscription of the opposition within a larger field—a ‘textual’ field that can account for nonpresence as other than lack of presence,” which is the second effort of a proper deconstruction theory (1269). The binary opposition in question throughout Götz and Meyer’s is then the countless recordings of history that repeatedly highlight the monstrosities done by Götz and Meyer, and failed to produce the memories and stories of his family. But what is the new meaning that comes about from the loss of such a vast number of people under both Götz and Meyer?

The narrator leaves off with a nuanced metaphor to describe the sort of meanings that arise from such a deconstruction of historical texts. He says “life is built on repetitions and that its movement, which resembles a straight line, actually goes round in circles. We are like a dog chasing its tail but never catching it” (Albahari 164). Within this metaphor, the narrator makes a claim that is not yet known to the reality of the characters within the novel; yet it posits a claim about history that suggests the repetition of the horrors that occurred in Serbia. Here is the trace of Götz and Meyer, where “every sign must originally retain the traces of the other signs against which it is defined if it is to achieve any meaning at all” (Bradley 150). In tandem with the function of a trace as defined by Derrida, Albahari’s example of what a trace matches the definition in so much that it is both a provocation of life and also a suggestion of absence in its circular pattern. The narrator’s acceptance of his unfinished reconstruction of history reinforces this: “as long as their face is nothing but a stand-in for any face, Götz and Meyer will return and repeat the meaninglessness of history that becomes, in the end, the meaninglessness of our lives” (167). At the end of the novel, Albahari comes full circle himself by evoking a meaning from the lack of meaning that has resulted from a poor recording of Serbian Jews in history.

In the larger context of the text, the readers are left off with a larger sense of history which fits the original description of deconstruction writing. The displaced mode of thinking throughout his writing ultimately not only challenges how meaning is produced by examining the meaninglessness of a text but also reconstructs an entirely new text in the process, which focuses on Götz and Meyer and the awareness of a cyclic pattern of oppression and genocide. If Derrida’s theory about the trace is “within what it is not,” then Albahari’s novel is a text deconstructing history that focuses on what has not happened, from people who no longer exist, and from a neglected history. The result of this is then referential to our own apathy and position between history and what is to happen.

III.

Because of the overwhelming media output of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, much attention has been drawn to the deniers of the Holocaust, misinformation spread through news outlets and social media, and most recently, the ever-prominent voice of famous songwriter, Kanye West, for his blatant antisemitic statements across social media platforms. The unfortunate role that Kanye West plays in revisionism exemplifies a form of silencing—or the creation of absence—to diminish access to knowledge and the understanding of the Holocaust and its effects. A revisionist is a person who “claim[s] there is no irrefutable evidence to back any of these ‘facts’ of the dominant Holocaust narrative, which serves only to perpetuate various state policies in the United States, Europe, and Israel” (Trouillot 12). Although West has not directly denied the event of the Holocaust, the Holocaust Museum of LA made a public statement in regards to how powerful words can be in silencing voices: “Words matter and have consequences, Ye. [. . .] The Holocaust with only words that begat stereotypes, racial and religious tropes, and blaming others and led to the murder of six million Jews.” Accordingly, the statements made by Kanye West (see Fig. 1) align with how Albahari captures the rhetoric of silence, and how it fails to bring justice to lost voices, but in turn, allows for the reconstruction of history based on a revival of silence.

When history is recorded, something is unfortunately left out. In the case of the Holocaust in Serbia, what is left out are the reliable witness statements to show as proof. After the last group of Jews was taken from the Fairgrounds in the Saurer, a “cloud of silence descended on the camp. It rolled sluggishly round the emptiness of absence, and like a sponge it absorbed the sounds that tried to hide in the vacated pavilions” (Albahari 97). In this scenario, the narrator refers to the ways silence erases the only people who felt the horrors. The silence is absence in a way that one cannot navigate a portion of history, to which Götz and Meyer are the voids preventing these stories from being shared. Nevertheless, Trouillot is aware of this deafening silence and offers words for how such an event occurs: “something is always left out while something else is recorded” (49). The notion Trouillot makes here is exemplary of how certain moments and events are discarded for the means of clarity, which the narrator cannot accept as a fair production of history. The narrator himself recognizes that too much is said, however, reflecting on how “I had said too much, as always” (Albahari 140). But in his desperate attempt to find meaning amid all of the documents which vet nothing of his family history, what pains the narrator the most is his earlier nothing that if he keeps speaking something will happen, “as if words mean something, as if I could really save someone” (Albahari 170). But what the narrator lacks awareness of, in this instance, is how his words can save someone, just as West’s words contribute to harming someone.

By recording anything at all, even through imagination and narrative, efforts are made through the protection of memory. But in so much as the voices of the Serbian Jews were never recorded in the first place, so comes the cruelty of silencing within archives, “an erasure more silencing than the absence or failure of memory,” occurs in so much as the words used by the German officers were intentionally misleading (Trouillot 60). As the narrator continues to piece together meaning, he notes, “I am thinking here of the prisoners, things that elude me, while I know what eludes them: I know Götz’s and Meyer’s names, and the real purpose of the Saurer, and the real meaning of the words transport and load ” (Albahari 121) By looking at what is lost, and what is gained through the movement of time, the narrator notes that some portions of the story are lost by downright erasure and replaced with names that only characterize the events rather than the first-hand experience. In turn, the misleading language within the documents aligns with the type of silencing within silence, where one idea is entirely uprooted in the production of history: “nothing can be heard from their names but silence. I can’t listen to silence anymore” (Albahari 121). Which, in the end, leads to the narrator’s strong urge to reconstruct history to prevent such erasure of history through power.

While West’s anti-semitic rhetoric around the Holocaust aimed toward Jewish people is rather concerning, as it enacts the motion of power he holds as a public figure, countless efforts have been made in response to the horrific statements made by West to reinstate how the silencing of others in history has then lead to the reconstruction of history. When looking at the rhetoric of silence itself, one can see how Albahari reinforces the strength of working with silence as a preventative measure of future atrocities. Scholar Cheryl Glynn writes, “Silence is not, in itself, necessarily a sign of powerlessness or emptiness; it is not the same as erasing. Like the zero in mathematics, silence is an absence with a function” (263). With this framework arises the new meaning that Albahari constructs in his deconstruction of historical documents and archives in Götz and Meyer; he posits silence as an absence that functions against typical modes of thinking. In other words, Trouillot posits how “silences can be made to speak for themselves to confront inequalities of power in the production of sources, archives, and narratives” and in this process make “silences speak and, in the process, lay claim to the future” (qtd. in Trouillot xiii). According to our narrator, the process in which history takes over does not have time for feelings and “for the inability to grasp what is happening. One day you are a human being, and the next, despite the armband or perhaps precisely because of it, you are invisible” (Albahari 35). To become invisible is what the narrator fears and pushes for in his deconstruction of history, and a movement toward an awareness of narratives, memories, and stories that make the silences that we ignore audible.

Conclusion

To what ends does history mask our access to knowledge and stories? While the narrator of Albahari’s novel is correct—we could never know every story that is lost. As such, the deconstructionist method that Albahari employs in the novel is not necessarily an emphasis on the narrator’s experience of meaninglessness, but rather the meaning that can be derived from the absence of meaning. By uprooting the entire system in which history is oriented, and critiquing the words and use of language that define history in a nontemporal narrative space that is not traditionally acceptable as means of history, the narrator points out how silence can be reworked to prevent a repetition of history. With an increasingly alarming rate of antisemitism in the United States due to public figures such as Kanye West, misinformation from political leaders, and misleading news stations such as Infowars, there is an ever-present need for awareness above all else.

Works Cited

Aarons, Victoria, and Alan L. Berger. “The Intergenerational Transmission of Memory and Trauma: From Survivor Writing to Post-Holocaust Representation.” Third-Generation

Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory, Northwestern University Press, 2017, pp. 41–66. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt22727kb.5.

Albahari, David. Götz and Meyer. Trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać, Dalkey Archive, 2015.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Ed. Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1981, pp. 84-258.

Bradley, Arthur. Derrida, Jacque. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, John Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Glenn, Cheryl. “Silence: A Rhetorical Art of Resisting Disciplines.” JAC, Vol. 22, No. 2, JAC, 2002, pp. 261-291, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20866487.

Kean, Beth. “WATCH HOLOCAUST MUSEUM LA’S CEO BETH KEAN ON CNN.”

Holocaust Museum LA, 18 Oct. 2022, www.holocaustmuseumla.org/post/watch-holocaust-museum-la-s-ceo-beth-kean-on-cnn.

Derrida’s of Grammatology, ProQuest Ebook Central,  Edinburgh University Press, 2008, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newpaltz-ebooks/detail.action?docID=364837.

Johnson, Nan. “Reader-Response and the Pathos Principle.” Rhetoric Review, Vol. 6, No. 2, Taylor & Francis Group, 1988, pp. 152-166.

Nealon, Jeffrey T. “The Discipline of Deconstruction.” PMLA, Vol. 107, No. 5, 1992, pp. 1266–79. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/462879.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. E-Book, Beacon Press, 2015, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb04595.0001.001.

White, Hayden. “Introduction.” Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, The John Hopkins University Press, 1973, pp. 1-9.

White, Hayden. “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory.” History and Theory, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1984, pp. 1–33. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2504969.