The Crisis of Imagination

During the Holocaust, Jewish diarists wrote in order to create a record of events as they happened. In The Crisis of Imagination, Eryk Tahvonen argues that even though they made every effort to convey the extent of the suffering they saw, they also avoided an obvious fact - the humanity of the per pe tra tors. By examining the way Jewish diarists depicted - and failed to depict - Nazis in their work, and by concentrating on the way they used language to psychologically distance themselves from perpetrators, Tahvonen demon strates that these writers were engaged in a non-physical, but nevertheless important, form of resistance. He concludes that this distancing was similar in many ways to well-known defense mechanism used by Nazis to dehumanize and murder Jews, and that this similarity points to a crisis for both victims and perpetrators in which acknowledging the humanity of the other impeded the ability to live - or to kill. Of interest to general readers and specialists in modern European history, Holocaust studies, and comparative genocide, The Crisis of Imagination is a valuable contribution to the cultural and literary history of the Holocaust.