Michael Dorland, Professor, School of Journalism & Communication, Carleton University
“Is it a curse to work on the Holocaust?”: Personal Reflections on my 2009 book, Cadaverland: Inventing a Pathology of Catastrophe for Holocaust Survival
Adorno’s famed pronunciamento about no poetry after Auschwitz early on raised the problem of the ethics of the style of work on the Holocaust. Historian Istvan Deak remarked years later that the Holocaust was, on the one hand, the most thoroughly studied of historical events, and on the other, the least understood. Michael Dorland here evokes the idea of “a curse” applicable to Holocaust research, drawing upon his experience with the 10 years of research it took for him to write the book, as well as that of the French and other survivors he writes about, in the struggle for recognition of their concentrationary experience. The “curse” relates to the problem of the “horror” of the Holocaust, in the face of the all too human tendency to recoil from horror, at least sometimes.