Elie Wiesel’s "After Night" From one generation to the next: the writing of great witnesses

Elie Wiesel © Shoah Memorial

Some witnesses wrote immediately after the war, creating a de facto literary genre. Others, later, have shed light on renewed aspects of the genocidal process and its aftermath. Over time, the public has discovered the works of Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Imre Kertész, Aharon Appelfeld, Charlotte Delbo and other great founding texts. How did these works influence our contemporaries and why did they become classics?

Apories and matrix games: the witness in Wiesel has always been wary of the writer. This mistrust generated contradictions that affected the reading of Wieselian texts. Yet a careful study of the narrative Night, in its different versions, offers a literary power that will never falter. Because Wiesel was able to extract from this original crucible a work of testimony nourished by doubt and anxiety.  Delphine Auffret is a specialist in the textual approach to testimony in Holocaust literature.

Jewish witnesses, sad angels: with La Nuit, then Le Dernier des Justes by André Schwartz-Bart, in 1959, we witness the emergence of the "Jewish witness" as a universal martyr figure. What made this recognition possible? At the cost of what reconfigurations of what was then called testimony? What makes a text admissible, and when? This will be an opportunity to look back at other great texts published at the dawn of the 1960s, which had very unequal editorial destinies, from Jorge Semprun to Jean Améry, via Edgar Hilsenrath.  Judith Lyon-Caen is a lecturer at EHESS.

If André Gide was able to say that classicism tends entirely towards understatement, then the work, and in particular Wiesel’s theatrical work, should be classified among the supporters of anti-classicism, insofar as his testimony consists in saying more to make less heard. In this challenge to say the unspeakable, Elie Wiesel tries an original scenic way, to break the classic codes and propose new avenues of reflection.  Guila Clara Kessous, actress and director, is a specialist in the dramatic work of the Nobel Prize winner and doctor under the direction of Elie Wiesel.

This meeting is part of a cycle of four meetings on the theme "From one generation to another: the writing of great witnesses"