"A" is for Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, Trauma Theory, and the "Children's Literature of Atrocity"

Since the early 1990s, children’s books about trauma, especially the trauma(s) of the Holocaust, have proliferated, as well as scholarly treatments of those books. Despite the difficulties of representing the Holocaust, or perhaps because of them, there seems to be consensus now that children’s literature is the most rather than the least appropriate literary forum for trauma work. Subjects previously thought too upsetting for children are now deemed appropriate and even necessary. Thus, in “A New Algorithm of Evil: Children’s Literature in a Post-Holocaust World,” Elizabeth R. Baer emphasizes the urgency of “a children’s literature of atrocity,” recommending what she calls “confrontational” texts, and proposing “a set of [four] criteria by which to measure the usefulness and effectiveness of children’s texts in confronting the Holocaust sufficiently” (384). 1 “A” is now for Auschwitz, and “H” for Holocaust (if sometimes for Hiroshima). And “B” is still for book, though no longer necessarily the Bible. 2 Baer sees as exemplary texts like Roberto Innocenti’s picture book Rose Blanche (1985), Seymour Rossel’s nonfiction history The Holocaust (1981), and Jane Yolen’s novel The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988). Such books emphasize their protagonists’ direct experiences of the Holocaust, experiences that extend to and presumably interpellate the child reader outside the story. How to explain this shift away from the idea that young readers should be protected from evil and toward the conviction that they should be exposed to it, perhaps even endangered by it? It’s almost as if we now expect reading about trauma to be traumatic itself—as if we think children can’t otherwise comprehend atrocity. Just how new is this faith in exposure, experience, and confrontation, and how do we assess its significance with respect to contemporary children’s literature and trauma studies? Many people believe that the Holocaust fundamentally changed the way we think about memory and narrative, as well as about human nature. Presumably the exposure model became necessary because