Ernst van Alphen, “Playing the Holocaust,” Mirroring Evil, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt

In this chapter from the Mirroring Evil catalogue, literary scholar Ernst van Alphen discusses the artworks in the form of or based on toys, with a specific focus on David Levinthal’s photographs, where scenes from Auschwitz are enacted by small dolls and figurines, Ram Katzir’s coloring book, and Zbigniew Libera’s Lego concentration camp set. All these toy arts play with the past of the Holocaust while inviting the audience to heteropathically identify with, to “become (like)” the Nazi perpetrator (77). Van Alphen suggests that such a playful engagement with this difficult past does not necessarily lead to trivialization or an unreflective identification with the perpetrator, but enables a critical, pedagogical engagement with the legacies of the Nazi past, though with a disturbing note.

Throughout the essay, Van Alphen provides the reader with erudite discussions on several topics including the concept of play, teaching, the relation between art and pedagogy, and that of narrative and drama. All of them are situated in the intertwined contexts of Holocaust remembrance and education, revolving around a central question: how do toys as art teach us about the Holocaust?

Van Alphen suggests that the toy, though widely regarded as inappropriate for representing the Holocaust and for educational purposes, is helpful in encouraging a new form of engagement with the traumatic past through its peculiar pedagogy of play, contrary to that of traditional Holocaust education which relies heavily on documentary materials while suffering from the illusion of the full mastery of the knowledge of the Holocaust. Van Alphen takes Libera’s Lego concentration camp set as an example, arguing that playing with it (or simply envisioning the play) not just invites audience to take, in this case, the problematic position of perpetrators. It also allows the audience to “re-enact” what might have happened in the Holocaust, rendering them affectively open to the traumatic past. Alphen concludes that playing produces the “felt knowledge” which he believes to be more helpful for Holocaust education, compared with the goal of “epistemic mastery” featuring in traditional Holocaust pedagogy. Highlighting play as crucial means of “soliciting partial and temporary identification with the perpetrators that “makes one aware of the ease with which one can slide into a measure of complicity” (77), Van Alphen points out how this pedagogy of play is particularly valuable in enabling knowledge concerning perpetrators.

Author of this entry: Chihhen Chang

Ernst van Alphen, “Playing the Holocaust,” Mirroring Evil, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt (New York: Jewish Museum, 2001): 65–83.