German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust

German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust PDF Author: P. Bos
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403979332
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 157

Book Description
Combining cultural history and literary analysis, this study proposes a new and thought-provoking reading of the changing relationship between Germans and Jews following the Holocaust. Two Holocaust survivors whose work became uniquely successful in the Germany of the 1980s and 1990s, Grete Weil and Ruth Kluger, emerge as exemplary in their contributions to a postwar German discussion about the Nazi legacy that had largely excluded living Jews. While acknowledging that the German audience for the works of Holocaust survivors began to change in the 1980s, this study disputes the common tendency to interpret this as a sign of greater willingness to confront the Holocaust, arguing instead that it resulted from a continued German misreading of Jews' criticisms. By tracing the particular cultural-political impact that Weil's and Kluger's works had on their German audience, it investigates the paradox of Germany's confronting the Holocaust without necessarily confronting the Jews as Germans. Furthermore, for the authors this literature also had a psychological impact: their 'return' to the German language and to Germany is read not as an act of mourning or nostalgia, but rather as a public call to Germans for a dialogue about the Nazi past, as a way to move into the public realm the private emotional and psychological battles resulting from German Jews' exclusion from and persecution by their own national community.

When Kafka Says We

When Kafka Says We PDF Author: Vivian Liska
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253353084
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description
Taking as its starting point Franz Kafka's complex relationship to Jews and to communities in general, When Kafka Says We explores the ambivalent responses of major German-Jewish writers to self-enclosed social, religious, ethnic, and ideological groups. Vivian Liska shows that, for Kafka and others, this ambivalence inspired innovative modes of writing which, while unmasking the oppressive cohesion of communal groupings, also configured original and uncommon communities. Interlinked close readings of works by German-Jewish writers such as Kafka, Else Lasker-Schüler, Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan, Ilse Aichinger, and Robert Schindel illuminate the ways in which literature can subvert, extend, or reconfigure established visions of communities. Liska's rich and astute analysis uncovers provocative attitudes and insights on a subject of continuing controversy.

German-Jewish Life Writing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust

German-Jewish Life Writing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust PDF Author: Helen Finch
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1640141456
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Book Description
Shows how Adler, Wander, Hilsenrath, and Klüger intertwine transgressive political criticism with the shadow of trauma, revealing new perspectives on canon formation and exclusion in postwar German literature. How did German-speaking Holocaust survivors pursue literary careers in an often-indifferent postwar society? How did their literary life writings reflect their postwar struggles? This monograph focuses on four authors who bore literary witness to the Shoah - H. G. Adler, Fred Wander, Edgar Hilsenrath, and Ruth Klüger. It analyzes their autofictional, critical, and autobiographical works written between the early 1950s and 2015, which depict their postwar experiences of writing, publishing, and publicizing Holocaust testimony. These case studies shed light on the devastating aftermaths of the Holocaust in different contexts. Adler depicts his attempts to overcome marginalization as a writer in Britain in the 1950s. Wander reflects on his failure to find a home either in postwar Austria or in the GDR. Hilsenrath satirizes his struggles as an emigrant to the US in the 1960s and after returning to Berlin in the 1980s. Finally, in her 2008 memoir, Ruth Klüger follows up her earlier, highly impactful memoir of the concentration camps by narrating the misogyny and antisemitism she experienced in US and German academia. Helen Finch analyzes how these under-researched texts intertwine transgressive political criticism with the shadow of trauma. Drawing on scholarship on Holocaust testimony, transnational memory, and affect theory, her book reveals new perspectives on canon formation and exclusion in postwar German literature.

Germany's War and the Holocaust

Germany's War and the Holocaust PDF Author: Omer Bartov
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801468817
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Omer Bartov, a leading scholar of the Wehrmacht and the Holocaust, provides a critical analysis of various recent ways to understand the genocidal policies of the Nazi regime and the reconstruction of German and Jewish identities in the wake of World War II. Germany's War and the Holocaust both deepens our understanding of a crucial period in history and serves as an invaluable introduction to the vast body of literature in the field of Holocaust studies.Drawing on his background as a military historian to probe the nature of German warfare, Bartov considers the postwar myth of army resistance to Hitler and investigates the image of Blitzkrieg as a means to glorify war, debilitate the enemy, and hide the realities of mass destruction. The author also addresses several new analyses of the roots and nature of Nazi extermination policies, including revisionist views of the concentration camps. Finally, Bartov examines some paradigmatic interpretations of the Nazi period and its aftermath: the changing American, European, and Israeli discourses on the Holocaust; Victor Klemperer's view of Nazi Germany from within; and Germany's perception of its own victimhood.

German Jewish Literature After 1990

German Jewish Literature After 1990 PDF Author: Katja Garloff
Publisher: Camden House (NY)
ISBN: 1640140212
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
Edited volume tracing the development of a new generation of German Jewish writers, offering fresh interpretations of individual works, and probing the very concept of "German Jewish literature."

Plunder

Plunder PDF Author: Menachem Kaiser
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 1328506460
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Book Description
A New York Times Critics’ Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Biography From a gifted young writer, the story of his quest to reclaim his family’s apartment building in Poland—and of the astonishing entanglement with Nazi treasure hunters that follows Menachem Kaiser’s brilliantly told story, woven from improbable events and profound revelations, is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather’s former battle to reclaim the family’s apartment building in Sosnowiec, Poland. Soon, he is on a circuitous path to encounters with the long-time residents of the building, and with a Polish lawyer known as “The Killer.” A surprise discovery—that his grandfather’s cousin not only survived the war, but wrote a secret memoir while a slave laborer in a vast, secret Nazi tunnel complex—leads to Kaiser being adopted as a virtual celebrity by a band of Silesian treasure seekers who revere the memoir as the indispensable guidebook to Nazi plunder. Propelled by rich original research, Kaiser immerses readers in profound questions that reach far beyond his personal quest. What does it mean to seize your own legacy? Can reclaimed property repair rifts among the living? Plunder is both a deeply immersive adventure story and an irreverent, daring interrogation of inheritance—material, spiritual, familial, and emotional.

Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust

Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust PDF Author: Leon I. Yudkin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hebrew literature
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Book Description
Discusses literary works in several languages by survivors and by members of the second and third generations. Parts of the book were published previously in different forms. Includes chapters on Ka-Tzetnik, Abba Kovner, Savyon Liebrecht, David Grossman, Jerzy Kosinski, and Primo Levi; the first and last chapters deal with general issues and later writers.

Encrypting the Past

Encrypting the Past PDF Author: Kirstin Gwyer
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191019917
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Book Description
Encrypting the Past puts forward the interpretative category of the first-generation German-Jewish Holocaust novel and examines its representational strategies. With reference to works by H.G. Adler, Jenny Aloni, Elisabeth Augustin, Erich Fried, and Wolfgang Hildesheimer, and a concluding section on W.G. Sebald, it shows how Holocaust literature was being written decades before postwar authors such as Sebald were credited with having found new ways of reflecting the unspeakable. It demonstrates that, before the theoretical debate over the fundamental representability of the Holocaust was even fully under way, first-generation authors were already translating un-narratable trauma into a literary strategy of un-narrating: a strategy of encrypting the Holocaust into the form and structure of their texts. The implications of treating these writers as a set, and their body of work as a hitherto unacknowledged category of Holocaust fiction, go well beyond drawing attention to a number of important but critically neglected authors. This study frames the analysis of first-generation narrative strategies in the broader debate on the ethics and aesthetics of Holocaust writing. In revealing how certain kinds of testimony have been privileged above others in international Holocaust studies, it raises questions of a more general nature concerning canon formation and our theoretical responses to the Holocaust. In considering foremost among these responses the theory of deconstruction and trauma theory, it finally invites a re-examination of the relationship between the (post-)modern and trauma.

Literature of the Holocaust

Literature of the Holocaust PDF Author: Alan Rosen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107008654
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Book Description
During and in the aftermath of the dark period of the Holocaust, writers across Europe and America sought to express their feelings and experiences through their writings. This book provides a comprehensive account of these writings through essays from expert scholars, covering a wide geographic, linguistic, thematic and generic range of materials. Such an overview is particularly appropriate at a time when the corpus of Holocaust literature has grown to immense proportions and when guidance is needed in determining a canon of essential readings, a context to interpret them, and a paradigm for the evolution of writing on the Holocaust. The expert contributors to this volume, who negotiate the literature in the original languages, provide insight into the influence of national traditions and the importance of language, especially but not exclusively Yiddish and Hebrew, to the literary response arising from the Holocaust.

German Life Writing in the Twentieth Century

German Life Writing in the Twentieth Century PDF Author: Birgit Dahlke
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 1571133135
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
"Life-writing", an increasingly accepted category among scholars of literature and other disciplines, encompasses not just autobiography and biography, but also memoirs, diaries, letters, interviews, and even non-written texts such as film. Whether these were produced in diary or letter form as events unfolded or long after the event in the form of autobiographical prose, common to all are attempts by individuals to make sense of their experiences. In many such texts, the authors reassess their lives against the background of a broader public debate about the past. This book of essays examines German life-writing after major turning points in twentieth-century German history: the First World War, the Nazi era, the postwar division of Germany, and the collapse of socialism and German unification. The volume is distinctive because it combines an overview of academic approaches to the study of life-writing with a set of German-language case studies. In this respect it goes further than existing studies, which often present life-writing material without indicating how it might fit into our broader understanding of a particular culture or historical period.