Seeing Nothing: Allegory and the Holocaust’s Absent Dead

In 1948, on the eve of his return to a Germany far different from the one he fled in 1933, the dramatist Bertolt Brecht was in Prague. There he made the following terse, almost elliptical entry in his journal:

Of 37,000 Jews 800 came back after the Hitler occupation. We visit the Jewish cemetery. It was reduced in 1903 to make room for a polytechnic. The gravestones were moved and left in a disorderly heap. But in the old part too the gravestones are quite indecently crammed together—even the synagogue, the oldest in Europe, was only permitted to be 9m wide and 15m long. The stones are ugly in shape, but covered in writing, and many tell of persecution. Scholars have grapes as their insignia.
(Journals 395)

The tone is one of indifferent observation. The precise measurement of the space, and his concentration on the grotesque and disorderly suggest something like a sketch for a set piece—a backdrop for a play possibly leading an audience toward a critical perception of persecution, a perception that would emphasize the almost studious and scholarly necessities to apprehend such injustice.