I first encountered Zbigniew Libera’s LEGO concentration camp kits (1996) when I was writing on Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Both Libera and Spiegelman, famously, used a medium typically associated with children in a self-effacing attempt to depict the Holocaust. Libera’s work offered an interesting counterpoint to Maus because, despite the apparent conceptual similarities, while Spiegelman’s masterpiece has been almost universally celebrated, Libera has been called an anti-Semite, has been asked to withdraw his work from exhibitions, and has been accused (perhaps correctly) of offering a glib pop-culture commentary on the largest and genocide – the most terrible event – in human history. I wanted to examine the two texts beside one another in order to work out what made them different and how each reflected the politics of Holocaust representation. Ultimately, as inevitably happens, the work took a different shape and when the time came to submit the final draft of my manuscript I had said everything I wanted to say about Maus but Libera had been reduced to a footnote and, finally, removed entirely. The Lego System kits still bother me, though, and I would like to explore why they bother me here.
Libera worked with the LEGO Corporation of Denmark to produce three kits, each made up of seven boxes of Lego. Each box contains all of the materials needed to construct a Lego simulacra of some aspect of a Nazi death camp. Boxes include buildings, a gallows, inmates, guards, and barbed wire. The scenes depicted include a lynching, the beating of an inmate, medical experiments, and corpses being carried from the gas chambers.
One way we might read Libera’s work is as a hyperbolic form of historiographical metafiction, a term coined by Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism to describe works which show ‘fiction to be historically conditioned and history to be discursively structured.’ By adopting an abstract form and a demonstrably impossible alternative history, certain texts, Hutcheon argues, point implicitly to the failure of any representation to capture the ineffable reality of historical events. The impossibility of articulation is doubly true of the Holocaust which, as many, many critics and writers have argued, defies our capacity for either imagination or expression. If we were to read Libera’s Lego System in such a vein then we would understand his use of a toy to depict the Holocaust as (like Spiegelman’s Maus) demonstrative of the failure of any means of articulation to approximate to the torture, humiliation, and murder of millions.
I understand this line of argument but I can not subscribe to it as a blanket excuse for every ironic or self-consciously inaccurate attempt to depict the Holocaust. Concessions made to the concept of historical accuracy with regards to the Nazi killing project are in danger of offering a degree of legitimacy to more extreme revisionist perspectives. Under the umbrella of representational impossibility Libera’s work unnecessarily distorts what occurred; his commandant, as Stephen C. Feinstein argues, bears more similarity to the Soviet gulag than the Nazi death camp and the entry gate lacks the well-known inscription. He appears to see the historiographical metafiction argument as license to abandon any form of historical accuracy.
Even if full representation is impossible, I can not help but feel that where we can offer accuracy we have a moral obligation to do so. The ‘how’ of the Holocaust, Robert Eaglestone argues, should never be neglected in favour of artistic license. Inaccuracies (of which there is a wide spectrum from allegory to outright lies and denial) are dangerous to understanding. To foreground a fundamental responsibility to historical truth in Shoah art and literature is to echo the final line of Levi’s introduction to If This Is A Man: ‘[i]t seems to me unnecessary to add that none of these facts are invented’. After the terror inflicted during the Holocaust, the Nazi’s attempts to destroy the camps and remove evidence of what had gone on, and subsequent attempts in some quarters at revisionism and denial, an earnest attempt at fidelity, even if true representation is impossible, is, I can not help but feel, imperative. It is here, incidentally, where Libera and Spiegelman part ways – while Maus articulates a failure to represent the Holocaust, Spiegelman went to great pains to research and, where possible, accurately depict his subject.
It would be easy, then, to simply dismiss Lebera’s Lego System as an ironic, transparently provocative, and deeply offensive play on, what is for others, an earnest and hard-fought attempt to bring some understanding to the worst event in human history. While I stand by my earlier assertions, I find it hard to dismiss the Lego kits as entirely vapid. I find the fact that the kits were built using existing Lego parts (modified slightly using paint in some cases) as an unsettling assertion of Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument that rather than being an aberration in an otherwise rational society, the anti-Semitism which informed the Shoah had roots in the pervading logic of pre-World War II European cultures. The component parts of genocide, the Lego kits could be read to assert, not only pre-date the Holocaust, but continue into modern society. The Holocaust did not occur in spite of, but relied upon the industrial model which built, and continues to build modern civilisation (the factory, trains, timekeeping, coordination, a drive toward efficiency). The reproducibility of the Lego medium (Libera made three sets but some people asked if they would become commercially available) suggests, terrifyingly, that the events (loosely) depicted can not be safely confined to history, but can easily be reconstructed from those apparently innocuous elements upon which modern society has been built. As Spiegelman asserts ‘Western Civilization ended at Auschwitz. And we still haven’t noticed.’
I am, of course, not the first writer to find myself grappling with these questions when it comes to Holocaust representation, and in many ways I find myself treading already well-worn pathways. I find myself simultaneously recoiling from the apparently glib treatment of the Holocaust in Libera’s Lego System, while simultaneously wondering if the confinement of the Nazi killing project to history (of which the argument for Holocaust exceptionalism is a component) is a way for us to avoid confronting the possibility of its reproducibility.
When I heard about the lego concentraton camp, I thought (and still think) it was a brilliant idea.
I like your point about the ongoing possibility of recreating the Holocaust. I think there’s also a point there about the way the Holocaust is a product which can be (and has been) packaged; it’s just another genre, or set, at this point, which people go to for characteristic genre pleasures (feeling deeply, being serious, projecting empathy, etc.)
It’s a comment on lego too, and on toys in general. There are a lot of toy sets of various sorts about war, and about world war II. Fighter planes dropping bombs are fun. Pretending to kill people in certain ways is okay, but not in others.
Personally, I find commentators reducing the Holocaust to merely one more thing to be crudely pinned on their perennial nemeses – the industrial revolution, consumerism – to be infinitely more offensive than depicting Auschwitz with the historical inaccuracies enumerated by Feinstein.
And then there’s this:
Sorry, victims of every Western crime against humanity before 1933! The people who did those things to you were still civilized. What happened to you just doesn’t matter enough.
Also, as Virginia Woolf noted, Western civilization happens to have ended around December 1910.
But they were civilised. Killing and cruelty is part of every culture everywhere.
What Spiegelman meant was that the dream of Western humanism died. Not an indefensible position, though I disapprove of such final despair: it leads to resignation or quietism.
Well now you’ve just changed the word.
(“Sorry, victims of every Western crime against humanity before 1933! The people who did those things to you were still humanists. [Or still had the “dream of humanism,” or whatever.] What happened to you just doesn’t matter enough.”)
Eh, I’d say final despair can be quietist or galvanizing, or probably neither, depending on the details – though Spiegelman is certainly quietist.
On the other hand, I’d say categorical rejection of despair is inherently quietist. Sometimes things really are gone forever, and when they are, then to deny that is simply to refuse to engage with the situation that actually exists.
But I don’t accept that the dream of Western humanism is irretrievably lost. Anyone who does is substituting cynicism for action. It’s up to us to make the world better if only at a micro-increment at a time, and to heal what we can of the past, to ensure proper penance and memory never fade regarding the atrocities of the past.
And, no, I was not changing the word. I was explicating it. And can’t Spiegelman catch a goddam break on this website? Bad faith twisting of his words is of no use whatsoever in intelligent discussion.
Hi Noah,
Using toys to explore the victims of war is a recurring theme in Libera’s works. If you haven’t seen them already you might be interested in Libera’s Eroica, which is a boxed set of four toy-solider-sized female figures, presumably in order to highlight the victimisation of women during war and to confront the incongruously palatable representation of violence in children toys.
I can’t believe I’m about to say this, and I kinda hate myself for it, but…I agree with Graham.
Both within the Holocaust and without, there were equal horrors wrought on humankind. The Belgian Congo is the most under-discussed genocide in history (http://study.com/academy/lesson/history-of-the-belgian-congo-imperialism-genocide-atrocities.html), and I’ve heard estimates of 20 million Congolese africans killed in a decade, accompanied by forced labor, maimings, and the complete destruction of the existing social economy. At Jasenovac, a concentration camp in Croatia, the warden collected the eyeballs of 20,000 Serbian inmates in a super-sized jar in his office, according to one Italian journalist at the time, to the point where he disgusted everybody short of Himler. And let’s not forget that Churchill famously thought of Indians as literal dogs, and cared nothing about starving millions of them to death at a time, repeatedly. To point to Auschwitz as the exact point in the 20th century where “Western humanism” died is not only grandiose, its specious. Western humanism was a fallacy to begin with.
It’s not “bad faith twisting of his words.” He said Western civilization ended at Auschwitz. [i]You’re[/i] trying to twist his words in his favor. And why should Spiegelman catch a break? He sucks!
Uuuuuuugh, and you talk about quietism. I’d say this is substituting piety for action.
Why would you, when it’s false?
And thank you for elevating the tone of the discourse. ”He sucks!”
Petar, you’re engaging on a dangerous slippery slope. This is how people relativise the Holocaust, by comparing it to other atrocities. In the end one states the Nazis were no worse than anyone else.
@Badlanders
It’s false that he said what he said?
As for slippery slopes, how’s this: “This is how people relativize other atrocities, by comparing them to the Holocaust. In the end one states that compared to the Nazis, everyone else wasn’t so bad.”
Wasn’t and isn’t so bad.
“Personally, I find commentators reducing the Holocaust to merely one more thing to be crudely pinned on their perennial nemeses – the industrial revolution, consumerism – to be infinitely more offensive than depicting Auschwitz with the historical inaccuracies enumerated by Feinstein.”
I’m not sure this was directed at me? But anyway, I don’t think I was doing that. I wasn’t saying that consumerism is like the Holocaust; I was saying that the Holocaust gets packaged for consumption (by, for example, Art Spiegelman, or Steven Spielberg.) I don’t think selling toys is equivalent to murdering millions — but nonetheless, our culture does tend to turn even murdering millions into just another chit in the marketplace. I think the Lego concentration camp gets at that in a way I find funny/horrifying/pointed.
The thread seems to have drifted away from the Lego project; I’m curious Graham what you think of it?
I’m aware that comparison of atrocities is tasteless and dangerous. The Holocaust is obviously a horrible event. But it’s not exceptional in any regard. And I say that knowing full well it sounds horrifying.
Let me clarify a bit. The Holocaust (and anything like) should not be accepted as a matter of course. But neither should any other genocide or war. When we exceptionalize the Holocaust and refuse to talk about famines engineered by the British in India, or genocide in the Congo, or even the horrors wrought on Slavs during the Holocaust (full disclosure, my grandfather is a Serbian Holocaust survivor), we end up normalizing all those other events by omission. The Holocaust was not an exceptional one-off, it’s one, particularly evocative instance of a historical pattern, and unless we understand it as an instance of a pattern, rather than some uniquely horrifying event, then we will never stop such things from occurring in the future.
Sorry about pushing the thread away from the piece (I seem to do this a lot, so I’ll stop myself here).
fwiw, as a Jew, I am extremely uncomfortable with the idea that the Holocaust was like nothing else, and can never be compared to other atrocities. There’s a really depressing history of Jews (like Elie Wiesel) using that logic to downplay the Armenian genocide specifically. Every historic event is unique in some way, but every historical event also has parallels. There’s no insult to Jews or to Holocaust victims in looking at similar dynamics in Rwanda, or Armenia, or in pointing out that genocidal violence seems to be a fairly constant human potential.
@Noah
No, that wasn’t directed at you at all. It was directed at this passage in Phillip Smith’s piece:
re Libera’s Lego project, I think you put it excellently here:
I don’t understand the idea that the Holocaust shouldn’t be compared to other atrocities. Of course, all atrocities have unique characteristics, but I don’t see the problem with pointing out their commonalities. There’s been a ton of criticism of Norman Finkelstein’s book The Holocaust Industry, and maybe he is wrong about some things, but I think he made a convincing case that Elie Weisel and other Holocaust writers have turned this crime into a creepy quasi-religion.
Okay, I posted at the same time as everyone else and wound up repeating them.
I think the tangent we started accidentally stumbles right back into a central point of the piece:
“The component parts of genocide, the Lego kits could be read to assert, not only pre-date the Holocaust, but continue into modern society.”
I think that speaks directly to the idea that the Holocaust can (and should) be compared to other atrocities as a symptom of systemic issues. If Libera can rebuild the Holocaust out of thoroughly modern, industrial components, could we not read the Holocaust (and any other such atrocity) as a production of industrial institutions and systemic problems in capitalism? And, if so, what’s the deal? What exactly are the components, and what do we do about them?
I’m not saying it shouldn’t be compared to other atrocities, but the novel aspects of the Holocaust should be borne in mind.
In fact every genocide should be particularised. It’s not a generic phenomenon. King Leopold’s genocide (and I believe the word was actually coined to apply to him) of the Congolese was actuated by sheer greed, as was Columbus’of the Caribs; but the Jewish Holocaust was an economic sinkhole that may have actually contributed to the fall of the Reich. Evil doesn’t wear a single mask universally applicable.
Graham Clark:
“It’s false that he said what he said?”
Again with the twistiness.
As you know perfectly well, Clark, I was referring to the falsehood of your describing me as “substituting piety for action,” when I was explicitly calling for action.
”As for slippery slopes, how’s this: “This is how people relativize other atrocities, by comparing them to the Holocaust. In the end one states that compared to the Nazis, everyone else wasn’t so bad.”
Merely describing something I’ve witnessed again, and again, and again.
The relevant question here is whether you’re looking narrative or causes. The former implies you want to consume history as a narrative, so you have to particularize it and dramatize it so that it can be sold and consumed (literally, and figuratively). The latter implies you’re looking to solve a problem, in this case, the problem of the occurrence of genocide. Particularizing any genocide is great for narrative purposes, if you’re trying to sell that event. It’s useless if you see these atrocities as a systemic, repeated issue (as I do) and want to prevent them from happening again.
Perhaps that’s the most important assertion, intentional or not, of Libera’s pieces, that analysis of the Holocaust should exist outside of genre altogether because it particularizes those events and removes from the contextual analysis necessary to prevent their repetition. Having read neither Maus nor scrutinized Libera’s work, I’m pretty comfortable saying that I vastly prefer Libera’s approach, because it raises all of these questions related to how we’ve packaged and consumed the Holocaust (as you pointed out, Noah), as well as how the Holocaust can be seen as engineered by repeated, not necessarily wholly unique circumstances. Libera’s piece, while still grim, seems to produce some hope in this respect; these things were terrible, but we can deconstruct them and somehow find a way to prevent them entirely in the future. Spiegelman’s approach seems to emphasize drama and some grimly romanticized version of events, because that’s what his chosen medium and genre require of its subject matter. Talking about the Holocaust that way seems not just counterproductive, but also tasteless.
…which is not surprising. I’ve never heard much to convince me that Spiegelman was particularly tasteful or non-ass-ish.
@Badlanders
Actually I didn’t know that, I thought we were still talking about Spiegelman.
@Petar Duric
No we can’t, because that both exaggerates and understates the unique qualities of the Holocaust. On the one hand, what we now call “genocide” of course predates the industrial revolution and what is usually meant be “capitalism” (that is, something that started in Europe in the 14th century or later). On the other, a lot of countries had industrial institutions and capitalism, but only one pursued and imprisoned practically all Jews wherever it had enough influence to be able to do so and methodically murdered six million of them in a period of six years.
The Holocaust is one of those things where there really seems like there’s lots of blame to go round. It has roots in Christian anti-semitism, but also in modern Darwinism, in capitalism, but also in collectivist visions that were inspired in part by socialism, in industrialization, but also in pre-industrial genocides. Something for everyone.
@Graham
That country also happened to be going through a particularly unique and traumatic depression, unique even by the standards of that time. Economic distress of some variety seems to be common contributor to genocides. But I get your point about linking genocide to capitalism de facto as being ill-conceived. That’s fair.
I guess I’m criss-crossing my point here. Germany’s Depression was certainly a major (if not the definitive) contributor to the grim path they chose, and it was uniquely terrible for the time. But it is still an instance of a particular pattern, whereby societies going through intense economic distress tend to produce radical ideologues that lead terrible movements, like Nazism. That seems the case in Rwanda and Cambodia. It seems economic distress is a sufficient, but unnecessary condition for such terrible events.
But (I don’t think I’m contradicting myself here), you’re point is correct Graham. My bad.
I think eugenic theories from the US played a role, too. I’ve been reading reviews of Timothy Snyder’s new book, which apparently says that Stalin’s atrocities prepared eastern Europe for the Holocaust.
What do you mean when you “prepared” because I would also use that word very differently…
Well, I think he says that Stalin’s destruction of several Eastern European countries’ social structures played a big role in people’s willingness to murder Jews. The book is called Black Earth, and I guess it and his previous book, Bloodlines, are very controversial.
“Bloodlands.” It was about the same subject.
I’ve also heard an argument that Stalin’s process of hyper-fast industrial development was both incredibly destructive (killed millions) and was also the only reason, or one of the only reasons that Russia was well-developed enough to resist Hitler’s blitzkrieg, and thusly, one of the only reasons the Russians won Stalingrad, and by corollary, the war. I don’t know enough to refute or support that claim, but that’s the opposing point that sounds fairly convincing, although horrible.
so, ugh, damn the internet for making me defend Art Spiegelman, but…I agree with Baldanders at least that there’s a more charitable interpretation of his end of civilisation bit, along the lines Baldanders said — Spiegelman might have been talking about the idea of Western civilisation, or the idea of it specifically among self-satisfied and historically ignorant Europeans. It’s not crazy to think that that died with Auschwitz, that even the most blinkered believer in Western civilisation could no longer ignore its problems. And this interpretation isn’t committed to Holocaust-exceptionalism
Is this interpretation (a) cutting Spiegelman too much slack, or (b) changing his words? (a) No. I agree with e.g. Donald Davidson that some sort of principle of charity constrains how we interpret other people (and ourselves, too). In banal, trivial cases we assume that people are broadly rational (while allowing for large deviations from rationality). If we extend that to nontrivial cases, we get a better discussion than when we stick to a gut-level interpretation that makes the other guy look like he’s saying something obviously stupid. (b) Maybe, but not necessarily. Maybe the original context would make clear that Spiegelman really means Western civilisation, and not (something like) the concept of Western civilisation or a certain belief in the virtue of Western civilisation. But, without that, Baldander’s interpretation looks equally plausible. Sometimes when people talk about “the concept of X”, they elide “the concept” and say just “X”. That can create a lot of conceptual confusion, but it is something that happens all the time.
Except he was clearly not saying that, because the very next sentence reads “And we still haven’t noticed.”
And I don’t know what “self satisfied and historically ignorant Europeans” is supposed to mean, though I’m pretty sure what it actually means is “I’ve got issues with Europeans that I’ll never admit to.”
Oh, by that phrase I just meant something like “Europeans who relatively uncritically bought into e.g. colonialist narratives of the white man bringing the light of civilisation into the darkest corners of barbarism”, and it was an idea I was attributing to (that interpretation of) Spiegelman.
But, ha, you got me with that next sentence, which does, uh, rather speak against my charitable interpretation. Me no read so good sometimes.
I don’t feel like I have much to contribute, but the thing I can’t get out of my head as I think about this article is the combination of the Spiegelman quote (which annoys me more every time I think about it) and the idea that you can use existing lego pieces to build a holocaust set as a metaphor for the components available within Western Civilization which made the holocaust possible. And while it is reductive to say capitalism and industrialization caused the holocaust, I think it’s more than appropriate to point out that industrialization made the holocaust more efficient, and made the task of murdering millions of people much easier. Charlemagne’s slaughter of 2,000 Saxons would likely have been more deadly if had had more than horses and swords to accomplish it.
But what I’ve been meditating on is that it isn’t so much that Western Civilization or Humanism or Liberalism ended or died or whatever, its that those things generate out of their own logic all of the genocides discussed int his thread and all the qualities that make them unique. When I put these ideas forward, most resistance comes from a fear of considering the possibility that civilization is built partially on the murder of folks who are different from us and that that is not merely an aberration in the history of civilization.
This piece really bothers me, too, but in bothering me I feel like it has accomplished something.