In der Sprache der Tater. Neue Lekturen deutschsprachiger Nachkriegs- und Gegenwartsliteratur

Abstract

Braese, Stephan, ed. In der Sprache der Tater Neue Lekturen deutschsprachiger Nachkriegs-und Gegenwartsliteratur. Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1998. 260 pp. In der Sprache der Tater is a collection of essays by scholars from Germany and Israel; several contributions date from a colloquium at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in December 1996. While there has been an increasing scholarly interest in the Jewish experience in German-speaking countries in recent years, this collection distinguishes itself with its focus on the most critical moment of this experience, the Shoah or Holocaust (both terms are used in this collection). Although it is risky to treat all literature on the Shoah under a common heading-and the collection makes abundantly clear that responses to the Jewish experience in the Third Reich have been varied-there seem to be some general tendencies. Many of the authors writing on the Shoah hesitate to characterize their texts as exemplary. Several works discussed in this collection articulate a resistance to overarching concepts and categories, preferring to focus on details. WG. Sebald makes such resistance into an underlying principle in Die Ausgewanderten (Sigrid Korf). Esther Dischereit's often fragmentary texts can be understood as originating in a search for images that adequately express her specific experiences (Itta Shedlezky). Adorno's statement about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz constitutes the most prominent attempt to reflect on the consequences of the Shoah for postwar literature, culture and thought in general. Adorno's ideas were based on a fairly traditional concept of poetry and, more broadly, on a literature that emphasized the subjective and specific. Not all postwar poetry followed these premises, but much of it nevertheless managed to contribute to a discourse on Auschwitz (Moshe Zuckerman). Documentary texts seem to be the most obvious literary means for author and audience to face and reflect on the experience of the concentration camps. The work of Alexander Kluge and Heimrad Backer, however, shows the very limited function, if not failure, of this particular literary strategy (Jurgen Nieraad). In spite of the philosophical implications of Adorno's statement, it is important to rememher that the issue of language was by no means abstract for those whom it most directly concerned, as is illustrated by the autobiographical texts of Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, who survived the war in hiding in France. Three of these texts were written in French, two in German. The ambivalence toward his native language is powerfully expressed and explained in the content of his writings. Goldschmidt's relationship to the German language and everything it represents is masochistic, not just in a metaphorical, but also in a literal sense (Alfred Bodenheimer). Traces of the problematic search for a language appropriate to lived experience are still visible in a relatively recent text like Christoph Ransmayr's Morbus Kitahara, which articulates the gap, as Amir Eshel convincingly shows, between those who have lived through the Shoah and those who have not. …