SOURCE: Langer, Lawrence L. “Acquainted with the Night.” In The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, pp. 31-73. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975.

In the following excerpt, Langer explores some ways in which various writers transformed their experience of the Holocaust into art.

Who will write us new laws of harmony? We have no further use for well- tempered clavichords. We ourselves are too much dissonance. 

Wolfgang Borchert

In the beginning there was the Holocaust. We must therefore start all over again. … What it was we may never know; but we must proclaim, at least, that it was, that it is. 

Elie Wiesel

The journey from documentation to art, from the gross horrors of the Holocaust to their imaginative realization in literature, is a devious and disconnected one, full of unexpected detours through terrain scarcely surveyed by earlier critical maps. Writers themselves have gone astray in this uncharted...