The tremendous rupture the Holocaust forced on contemporary consciousness has helped it become one of the most thoroughly researched and documented periods of history. In recent years, the concentration camps, their victims and their executioners have become fertile ground for minds trained in a wide variety of disciplines. Competing claims about the contemporary usefulness of the Event – using the victims to understand subjectivity, biology, psychology, etc. – obscure the victims’ suffering. In many ways, the cacophony of voices addressing the ever-evolving complexity of Holocaust scholarship and memory has allowed contemporary subjects an alibi that protects them from hearing the voices of the victims.

These critical appropriations of Holocaust experience abound in the interpretation of Holocaust testimonies. This dissertation argues that testimony forms a genre unto itself, typified by traumatic silences, lacunae and constant shifts in tense, person and space. Without distinguishing testimony from parallel genres such as memoir or historical narrative, these interruptions in narrative continuity and literary expectations cannot be read. Therefore, this text argues in favor of a novel hermeneutics of testimony that can attend to these traces of the survivors’ battles with language, memory and trauma. Drawing from Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of ethical subjectivity – through discussions of works by Primo Levi, Aron Appelfeld, Jean Améry and Levinas himself – these chapters argue that only such a hermeneutics can respond to testimony’s ethical demand.