Few people would use the word comedy and the Holocaust in the same sentence.
But Visiting Professor Walter Geerts encourages authors to incorporate humor into literature about the Holocaust.
Geerts' lecture, entitled "Variations on the Grotesque: Some Thoughts on Holocaust Literature," took place in Williams Hall Monday night and was attended by about 30 faculty members and graduate students representing departments ranging from Germanic Studies to Italian Language.
Geerts is teaching at Penn this semester as part of an exchange program with Antwerp University in Belgium. He is currently teaching a Germanic studies graduate seminar and the undergraduate Comparative Literature course "Literary Responses to the Holocaust."
Geerts presented his theory that "comedy is too important a part of literature to exclude it from the Holocaust."
He considered the literary styles of three authors -- Primo Levi, Imre Kert‚sz and Kurt Vonnegut -- discussing how each depicted the grotesque in what he claimed was a satirical or paradoxical way.
Geerts discussed one of Levi's works, Survival in Auschwitz, by calling it a satire, since "it is based on a paradox: the normality of a concentration camp."
"Levi renders his days in camp through language unadorned and chaste," Geerts said. "The Holocaust as literary inspiration, though, is a contradiction in terms."
Author Imre Kert‚sz, only 15 years old when he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp, wrote Fateless in 1975. Geerts emphasized that the book is not an account of a Holocaust survivor -- rather, it is a philosophical analysis.
"In a mood of denial, Kert‚sz decided to give a positive spin, or an optimistic outlook," he said. "The Holocaust becomes normal."
Geerts added that the reader of Kert‚sz's work must be prepared for descriptive phrases such as a "beautiful concentration camp."
Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night does not focus on the Holocaust, but rather is an account of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who introduced conveyor belts to crematoriums and is now jailed in Israel. Geerts found Mother Night to be an "extraordinary satire of propaganda."
Dutch Studies faculty member Robert Naborn said that he was initially skeptical that Geerts' choice of authors could be discussed together in one talk.
"I was surprised that he used Vonnegut, but in the end it fit well," he said. "I was pleased with it."
The audience was also receptive to Geerts, including Italian lecturer Nicoletta Marini-Maio.
"It was very stimulating... it made me think about the historical treatment of the Holocaust in Italian literature," she said.
Mary Beth Wetli, a graduate student in German, found Monday's talk to be "a provocative and enlightening lecture."
