Career beginnings Langer began teaching at the
University of Connecticut in 1957 and moved to
Simmons College in Boston in 1958, where he remained until his retirement in 1992. 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. 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, which was published in 1976 and was a finalist for the
National Book Award. A major theme in Langer's work over the years derived 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 later years, Langer collaborated with the artist and child Holocaust survivor Samuel Bak Langer's last publications were the books
The Afterdeath of the Holocaust (2021),
Hierarchy and Mutuality in Paradise Lost, Moby-Dick and The Brothers Karamazov (2022), and a compilation of his work with Bak,
An Unimaginable Partnership: The Art of Samuel Bak and the Writings of Lawrence L. Langer (2022). == Awards ==