claire m. tylee
(I meanFancyitselfe,) wee callImagination, as I said before: But when we would express
thedecay, and signifie that the Sense is fading, old, and past, it is called Memory. So that
ImaginationandMemoryarebutonething.
Fenton’s ‘A German Requiem’ (1983) is concerned with the collective rituals of
oblivion whereby Germany was keeping recollection of the Holocaust at bay, and
dramatizes that wilful amnesia. Paulin’sThe Invasion Handbook(2002) tries to
reveal the processes of deception and evasion at work in the British collective
memory of what led from the First World War to the Battle of Britain, paying due
regard to the quiet force of anti-Semitism. If early on, the problem lay in breaking
silence in order to raise people’s awareness of what the Holocaust involved, to engage
their imaginative sympathies, by the 1990s, as Andreas Huyssen demonstrated, the
major problem had become the hackneyed use not only of names and places but of
Holocaust iconography, especially in films and on television, with the consequent
danger of vacuous trivialization.^35 As racism surfaced again in Europe, Fenton and
Paulin were trying to find new ways to refresh our culture.
Although so many British poets have written in response to the Holocaust,
perhaps the term ‘British Holocaust poet’ should be reserved for the Jewish poets
whodirectlysufferedpersecutionundertheNazisandwhocametotermswith
their trauma through their poetry: theKindertransportpoets Karen Gershon, Lotte
Kramer, and Gerda Mayer.^36 Nevertheless, in order to characterize their verse, it is
helpful to place it against the poetry written by Gentiles and by Jewish writers who
were also survivors, but in a secondary sense, since they were born in Britain. It is
plausibly argued that other British poets have been influenced by the Continental
Holocaust poetry they may have read or even translated, particularly Celan; yet this
does not seem to be true of theKindertransportpoets. Rather, their models belong
to an anglophone tradition, and it is interesting to speculate why.
Obviously we cannot deal here with every English poem related to the Holocaust.
However, there are two poets born between the wars like theKinder-transportees,
who have written extensively in profound response to the Holocaust and whose
poetry has created critical controversy: SylviaPlath and Geoffrey Hill. I want to place
alongside Plath’s feminist rage and Hill’s humanist compassion the cynical Marxist
work of a poet born after the war, Tom Paulin. Paulin’s writing has responded to the
postmodern condition of the early twenty-first century when the Holocaust has been
commercially exploited almost to the point of triviality. Like Walter Benjamin’s
Angel,^37 Paulin looks back at the wreckage of European history from the Treaty of
Versailles onwards to 1941, and situates his own response to the Jewish genocide
(^35) See Huyssen,Twilight Memories, 251–2.
(^36) I take the term from Peter Lawson’s article ‘Three Kindertransport Poets: Karen Gershon, Gerda
Mayer and Lotte Kramer’, in Behlau and Reitz (eds.),Jewish Women’s Writing of the 1990s and Beyond,
87–94.
(^37) Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, inIlluminations,trans.HarryZohn,ed.
Hannah Arendt (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 259.