Lawrence Langer, Unblinking Scholar of Holocaust Literature, Dies at 94

Lawrence L. Langer, a literary scholar whose uncompromising assessment of the Holocaust as an event so great and evil that it defies the moral framework, helped deepen scholarly and popular understanding of the atrocity, died Monday at his home in Wellesley, MA. He was 94 years old. .

His son, Andrew Langowitz, said the cause was rectal cancer.

In some fifteen books and monographs, Dr. Longer a searing interpretation of the Holocaust as a moral black hole from which even meaning cannot escape. He rejected words like “survivor,” “hero,” “martyr” and “tragedy” when applied to the Holocaust because, he said, they alluded to the possibility of a redemptive silver lining.

“In the decades after the war, there was pressure to fit the Holocaust into a moral framework,” Ruth Franklin, a biographer and literary critic, said in a telephone interview. “What he emphasized was that there was no morality to be found.”

Dr. Langer agreed with writers, many of whom were victims of the Holocaust, including Primo Levi, Paul Celan and Tadeusz Borowski, who resist easy explanations for their experiences. For them, and for him, survival was not a matter of will, but of brute chance and a series of impossible choices that could not fit within conventional morality.

“Life in the Holocaust was an accident,” he said in the documentary 'Lawrence L. Langer: A Life in Testimony' (2022), by Joshua Greene.

Reason, humanism and the values ​​of the Enlightenment had no function in the concentration camps, he argued. Instead, he found himself coining new terms to help interpret it – the 'choiceless choice', 'after death', 'inappropriate guilt'.

“Traditional language will not be enough to confront this experience we call the Holocaust,” he said in the documentary.

Dr. Langer, in turn, was critical of anyone who tried to find a morality in the Holocaust: philosophers, Hollywood melodramas, even Anne Frank. She fell short, he argued, with her assertion at the end of her diary that “despite everything, I still believe that people are truly good at heart.”

All this, he said, obscured the terrible truth at the heart of the story.

“There is nothing dignified about watching 10 members of your family be murdered, and there is nothing triumphant about staying alive when you are powerless to help the people you love stay alive,” he told in 1995 The New York Times.

The early work of Dr. Langer focused on the literature of the Holocaust, but in the late 1970s he shifted his attention to oral testimonies of its victims.

In 1978, Geoffrey H. Hartman, a literary scholar at Yale, invited Dr. Out longer to work on the Fortunoff Video Archive, a new program in which Holocaust scholars spent hours interviewing victims. Dr. Langer would eventually interview more than a thousand, with some interviews lasting as long as 16 hours.

He drew on about 300 of those conversations to write “Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory” (1991), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism and which The Times named one of the ten best books of the year.

The influence of Dr. Langer was acutely felt in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Holocaust increasingly seeped into popular culture. Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning film Schindler's List was released in 1993, the same year the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum opened on the National Mall.

At one point, the experts charged with designing the museum were trying to decide how to mark the end of the visitor experience. One board member suggested ending with something uplifting, like Anne Frank's famous quote.

“I said if we do that, Larry Langer will tear us apart,” Michael Berenbaum, project director for the museum's development, said in a telephone interview. “And worse, he would be right.”

Instead, the museum experience ends, inspired by Dr. Longer, with a film with testimonies from survivors.

Lawrence Lee Langer was born on June 20, 1929 in the Bronx, the son of Esther (Strauss) and Irving Langer, a clerk at Ellis Island.

He graduated from the City College of New York in 1951 with a degree in English, and received his doctorate in American literature from Harvard in 1961. He arrived at Simmons College in Boston as an assistant professor in 1958 and remained there until his retirement in 1992.

He married Sondra Weinstein in 1951. She and their son Andrew survive him, as do their daughter Ellen Lasri, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Dr. Langer originally worked on decidedly non-Holocaust-related subjects, such as the novels of Henry James. He did not encounter the subject of his life's work until 1964, when he visited the site of the Mauthausen concentration camp in the north of the country on a Fulbright grant to teach at the University of Graz in Austria.

He was the only visitor that day and wandered the grounds and buildings in terrified awe.

“I sat on the floor, covered my eyes and tried to reconstruct what it felt like to be in the gas chamber,” he said in the documentary. He quickly realized that imagining the experiences of those in the camps was an impossible task, but also one worth pursuing for the rest of his career.

Returning to Simmons, he created what is considered the nation's first academic course on literature and the Holocaust. He also began work on his first book, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, most of which he wrote in 1968 and '69 while on sabbatical in Germany.

It took him five years to get it published. He later said that the academic press did not seem to know what to do with a book that used fiction to understand a historical event. The Yale press eventually picked it up and it was published in 1976. It was a finalist for the National Book Award that year and is today considered a founding figure of Holocaust studies.

As he continued to delve into oral history, Dr. Also discusses the problem of art and the Holocaust. “How do you write a poem about Auschwitz?” he often wondered, and others around him.

He found one answer in the work of Samuel Bak, a painter and Holocaust survivor whose work draws on artists like Salvador Dalí and Hieronymus Bosch in an attempt to convey the evil emptiness of the atrocity. Dr. Langer wrote six monographs on Mr. Bak's work, including, most recently:An Unimaginable Partnership: The Art of Samuel Bak and the Writings of Lawrence L. Langer” (2022).

“All Holocaust art,” he wrote in his book “Preempting the Holocaust” (1998), “is built on a mountain of corpses, so that it can never be an act of celebration.”