The desire from children of Holocaust survivors to record personal histories before it is too late is to some, more important than the survivor’s desire or lack thereof, themselves, to create an account from their experiences. Baker’s theory concerned with second-generation composers of holocaust texts like himself is that the need to re-create and to delve back into the past is borne out of guilt. The guilt experienced by some is based around the fact that while their parents have been through the most horrific atrocities, their children cannot comprehend the extent of their suffering. In their attempt to find their place culturally through empathising with their parents, second generation composers find perhaps, a part of their own identity whilst gaining a sense of closure. By investigating their background through their parents’ memories, the authors of this generation are able to re-create for themselves, a feeling that they, now, have achieved retribution for their parents past.
Mark Baker’s Fiftieth Gate can be viewed as not only an attempt to represent, and re-create to an extent, his parent’s experiences during World War II, but also as a dialogue of self-discovery. Baker, an historian by profession, thus pushes his parents away from the empathy expected in a personal recount of a sad past, but rather urges them to give him the facts. Throughout the text, Baker’s struggle between the “true” historical factual form and the more empathic subjective form of writing becomes evident. It is through this struggle as well as Baker’s self-reflexivity that The Fiftieth Gate becomes a very human text, permitting the responder to go beyond the role of audience and to become involved within the text.
Baker employs the use of italics to imply his parent’s direct accounts that are often interspersed with his own, more factual comments. For example, at the beginning of chapter VI, Baker’s comments over his parents serve as a (sometimes useless) commentary to the account being told.
“For him it began in Wierzbnik.
I was born in Wierzbnik.
Wierzbnik was born before him. In 1657, founded by bishop Boguslaw Radoszewski who obtained royal permission to colonise woodlands along the Kamienna River.
I remember on Saturday all the Jews would go walking in the forest…”
The contrast between Baker’s father’s sentimental comments on his past and Baker’s hard facts and straight background information serves to remind the audience of the manner of history. No one representation is adequately able to summarise or explain the past which explains the composer’s need to re-establish ideas through fact.
The historical documents that Baker had searched for in his pursuit of the truth to his parent’s stories and included fragments of in the text, serve to authenticate his story to the wider audience. To the composer, it was not simply enough to satisfy his own thirst for fact, but to demonstrate to the world his findings and the veracity of his background.
The use of extended metaphor of the fifty gates serves to demonstrate Mark Baker’s sentiment towards his endeavour to find the truth beneath his and his parent’s history. The symbolism of each chapter as a gate truly encompasses the concept of a journey through the opening of memory and through the past. As Baker approaches the end of his journey of discovery he draws to a close the various accounts and memories and the feeling that he has achieved a harmony between the roles of fact and subjectivity in the telling of history. Through the opening of each gate, Baker comes to the realisation that history and memory are both required in any account of the past.
Maus is a parallel story described in a post-modern comic book style. The mode in which the history is represented is unusual, as the approach taken is reminiscent of humour and laughter. Although the major subject of the stories, the holocaust, is anything but funny, the story is presented in such a way that the viewer is positioned to see humour in the cynicism and the pessimism of Art Spiegelman’s father, Vladek.
The original approach to a representation of the Holocaust allowed Art Spiegelman to both tell his father’s story in an interesting and captivating manner, as well as allowing some insight into the way in which the history of the Holocaust affects ‘second generation’ victims. The self-reflexivity employed by Spiegelman is juxtaposed against Vladek’s account of his experiences. An example of Spiegelman’s obviously intentional attempt at bringing the audience closer to the text is the depiction of a conversation between himself and his father is which he says, “I still want to draw that book about you… The one I used to talk to you about… About your life in Poland, and the war” to which Vladek replies “It would take many books, my life, and no one wants anyway to hear such stories.” The documentation of this conversation immediately draws the reader into the story and gives a sense of importance at being almost personally talked about by the subjects of the text.
The parallel stories of Vladek’s past contrasted against Art’s reactions and feelings towards his search for identity through the medium of oral history combine to give a compelling and interesting perspective on representations of the Holocaust.
Both of these texts are a search for an identity of the present, through investigation of the past. Although the content of Maus and The Fiftieth Gate is closely related through the parents of both authors’ reluctance to divulge their experiences of the past while the composers both pushed their parents towards giving an account in order to have the story in writing before it was lost, this does not typify the generation of Holocaust survivors. Many victims of the holocaust are and have been, eager to come forward and document their personal stories. Without these stories, the history of the Holocaust would not be a real history, but instead a cluster of numbers and figures with no real meaning and with no faces. In relating personal experience to greater history, each representation of any aspect of the Holocaust contributes to the grand narrative that is history.
Michel Foucault 1989, published 1992
The Fiftieth Gate, Mark Baker, pg 24, 1997
