In 1940 near a small town in southern Poland called Oswiecim, close to the confluence of the Vistula and Sola rivers, the Germans built an enormous camp they called Auschwitz. Between 1940 and early 1945, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, between 1 million and 5 million people, many of them Jews, were systematically killed there.

The fact of the existence of Auschwitz seems almost to defy human comprehension, to challenge the very idea of memory. How can a person even begin to approach such monumental evil? In his new book, History and Memory After Auschwitz (Cornell University Press, 1998), Dominick LaCapra, the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies at Cornell University, focuses on the interactions of history, memory, ethics and politics in the aftermath of the Shoah.

"Memory is both more and less than history, and vice-versa," writes LaCapra. "History may never capture certain elements of memory: the feel of an experience, the intensity of joy or suffering, the quality of an occurrence. Yet history also includes elements that are not exhausted by memory, such as demographic, ecological and economic factors. More important, perhaps, it tests memory and ideally leads to the emergence of both a more accurate memory and a clearer appraisal of what is or is not factual in remembrance."

LaCapra focuses on Camus' novella The Fall, Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah and Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning "comic book" Maus, in which a son tries to understand his father's survival in Auschwitz.

LaCapra examines the role of art, memory, history and psychoanalysis, and how they are used by people to try to come to terms with the deep and overwhelming trauma caused by an experience of the Holocaust.

"Mourning involves memory-work," LaCapra writes, "in the attempt to convert haunting presences into honored dead who can be laid to rest but not simply forgotten or dismissed. I also have intimated that mourning itself should be recognized as a gift of which not everyone is deserving. The problem is that there may be dead who cannot be laid to rest, either because their loss is irremediable and inconsolable, or because they do not deserve to be honored, or both.

"Through Maus Spiegelman works out a multifaceted and layered memory of the past that is continually questioned and riven by contemporary concerns, thus raising the question of the extent to which past and present are inextricably interwoven through belated effect and partial recognitions -- notably the insistent quest of the son for knowledge of the father's traumatic experience of a lost world. The father may himself not fully possess this knowledge, and he is reluctant to try to evoke that past or reconstruct missing knowledge."

LaCapra has been teaching at Cornell since 1969, has received the Clark Award for distinguished teaching and served for five years as director of Cornell's Society for the Humanities. He has written nine books, including History and Criticism and Soundings in Critical Theory, edited or co-edited two other books and has held Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson and Harvard University fellowships. At Cornell, LaCapra holds appointments in the fields of history, comparative literature, Romance studies and Jewish studies.

"I consider my work to lie at the intersection of critical theory and history," LaCapra says, "and one of my principal concerns has always been to reflect critically on historical procedures and research strategies. The Holocaust has given me a specific focus for these concerns as well as an area of inquiry which is of basic importance both in itself and in the ways research and thought about it may have implications for other intensely charged, value-laden areas of interest.

"Auschwitz is, of course, a camp that seems to epitomize the Nazi treatment of Jews and other victims," LaCapra continues. "Its operations combined those of a work camp and a death camp. But it should not serve to obscure other aspects of the Nazi genocide, such as the operations of the Einsatzgruppen and related units in the east that rounded up and killed in often gruesome and disconcerting ways a very large number of people. Nor should the emphasis on the Nazi genocide overshadow the significance of other genocides, including recent ones in Rwanda and Bosnia."

"This is the work of a distinguished mind with a considerable power of assimilation and synthesis," says Yale University's Geoffrey Hartman. "History and Memory After Auschwitz focuses not so much on describing or even understanding the Holocaust as on the appropriate 'subject position' of those born afterwards and still close enough to be haunted by the event. LaCapra makes it clear not only how complex the act of reception is in this case but also how easily it can go wrong and what concepts may help us to avoid error."

"The idea of the uniqueness of the Holocaust or of some other series of events often leads us to fabricate a grim competition for first place in victimhood or at least seems to cast problems in terms of an idiotic zero-sum game in which attention paid to the Holocaust must subtract or divert attention from the heritage of slavery or the plight of the Palestinians," says LaCapra. "This can, of course, happen in ideological and political uses of the Holocaust. But being alert to these possible uses or abuses can help one to guard against them in the way one poses and addresses problems. In my judgment, the study of the Holocaust should help to sensitize one to problems that may not be restricted to the Holocaust but that appear differently in different contexts, including the traumatic effects of genocide in the lives of its victims."