SOURCE: Bernstein, Michael André. “Unrepresentable Identities: The Jew in Postwar European Literature.” In Thinking about the Holocaust after Half a Century, edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, pp. 18-37. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Bernstein suggests that the Jew has not been treated in all his complexity in postwar European fiction, but rather as a representative of a “cemetery culture.”

Ignorance about those who have disappeared undermines the reality of the world.

—Zbigniew Herbert, “Mr. Cogito on the Need for Precision”

I

Initially, the tale may seem all too familiar. After so many similar narratives, this story's trajectory from the gradual, piecemeal reconstruction of a family's devastation at the hands of the Nazis to bitter disappointment at the postwar German legal system's callous refusal of justice, let alone of repentance, for that murderous brutality moves us less by its scrupulously assembled details than by our always...