ABSTRACT
It is finally memory on which denial has its most profound and damaging effect: not history, not the truth, but the events of the Shoah that reside in the memories of those who were there and, more and more through the projections of history, and of fiction, and of images, of those who weren’t. It hurts them by filling the silence that inevitably comes from the “damage” of denial with the deniers’ false but apparently plausible explanation of the destruction of central European Jewish culture. Lyotard tells us that the Holocaust is a limit case in which the testimonies that bore the traces of the here’s and now’s, the documents that indicated the sense or senses of facts have been destroyed. The witness, as much as the historian, is charged with “breaking the monopoly over history granted to” so-called transparent language and must lend an ear “to what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge” (Lyotard 57). Our job is to find a way to write that allows what is impressed in memory but lost to language and to “evidence” to have an effect on history. We’ll see, in the next section, just how difficult this, too, may be.
