Career beginnings

Langer's interest in the Holocaust began in 1963, after he received a Fulbright grant to teach American literature at the University of Graz in Austria.^[3] In May 1964 he drove with an American colleague through Czechoslovakia to Poland and spent two days at Auschwitz, inspecting the main camp (with several Soviet soldiers) and the remains of the killing facilities at Birkenau.^[4] After this trip, Langer began exploring the imaginative literature written about the concentration and death camp experiences. Upon his return to Simmons College he introduced a seminar on the Literature of Atrocity, versions of which he taught for the next 25 years. In 1968–69 he took a sabbatical year in Munich, Germany, where he completed his first book on Holocaust literature, “The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination.”^[2]

Career

Lawrence L. Langer began teaching at the University of Connecticut in 1957 and moved to Simmons College in 1958, where he remained until his retirement in 1992. In 1965 Langer became the first professor in the United States to teach a course on Holocaust literature, which he initially titled ‘The Literature of Atrocity.’ In 1976 he was awarded the Alumnae Endowed Chair, and in the Fall of 2002 he was the Strassler Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University.^[1] Presently, Langer remains the Alumnae Chair Professor of English, emeritus.^[5]

A major theme in Langer's work over the years derives from his skepticism regarding efforts to deflect attention from the atrocities of the Holocaust by stressing the role of resistance and rescue in the ordeal of European Jewry. In his writing he understands and deplores the need to extract some positive meaning from a destructive event like the Holocaust, and argues that the impulse to learn something of value from the Holocaust experience may represent nothing more than an unconscious desire to avoid confronting its brutal realities. In Versions of Survival he established the idea of “choiceless choice” to describe the disintegration of moral reality for camp inmates and the general unprecedented situations of conflict that Jews found themselves in during the Holocaust. Additionally, he also developed the notion of an “afterdeath” of the Holocaust to accompany the “afterlife” that most survivors returned to with admirable resilience following liberation. His writing shares the essential historical reality of the Holocaust by describing the event as a story of mass murder, and challenges the belief that the Holocaust sanctifies the dignity of the human spirit.

In recent years, Langer has collaborated with the artist and child Holocaust survivor Samuel Bak in a series of volumes that combine critical commentary and interpretation with paintings whose vivid visual imagery seeks to challenge the difficult task of finding spiritual and intellectual comfort in a disordered Post-Holocaust world.

With the publication of Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust by Sonja Hedgepeth, CNN carried an article that included Langer stating "I have no doubt that some women were raped... [though] the significance [or rate] of rape is small," with Langer stating the low rate being due to the Nazi racial hygiene indoctrination, brothels in each concentration camp which 'aryan' women from the surrounding environs visited and the risk of typhoid and disease. Langer's statements and view, derived from testimony interviews, is supported by Lenore Weitzman and Myrna Goldenberg with all three contributing in various degrees, to the similar book Women in the Holocaust.^[6]