Re-inscribing Holocaust Memory: Ruth Klüger’s still alive as Jewish-American Autobiography

Abstract

This essay proposes that Ruth Klüger’s still alive is an intentional American rewrite of her German autobiography. Using different strategies of adaptation and cross-cultural translation, Klüger transforms her life story into a contemporary Jewish-American autobiography. This re-inscription of memories, especially those of her youth in Vienna, her Holocaust survival and migration into a different memory community is done to create ‘thick’ relations with, and ethically and intellectually engage, her American readership. By recreating her autobiography as American, Klüger highlights transnational aspects of Holocaust memory, but inscribes her past within national containers of memory. She does this to bring the Holocaust home to America, rather than portraying it as a locally or temporally distant event.