The Legacy of Ruth Klüger and the End of the Auschwitz Century ed. by Mark H. Gelber

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Legacy of Ruth Klüger and the End of the Auschwitz Century ed. by Mark H. Gelber Adam J. Toth Mark H. Gelber, ed., The Legacy of Ruth Klüger and the End of the Auschwitz Century. Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts 20. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2022. 190 pp. Ruth Klüger's death in 2020 dealt an enormous blow to the fields of German, Jewish, and Austrian Studies. Her passing was not only a tremendous loss for these scholarly communities but represents a larger, inevitable conundrum for scholarship on the Holocaust: the dying out of survivors with living memory of the travesty. The Legacy of Ruth Klüger and the End of the Auschwitz Century aims to serve both as a tribute to Klüger and her memory as well as a springboard for meditation on how to discuss the Holocaust once the remaining survivors are gone. The volume's contributors—Mark H. Gelber (who edited the volume), Sander L. Gilman, Heinrich Detering, Stephan Braese, Irène Heidelberger-Leonard, Ulrike Offenberg, Monica Tempian, Daniel P. Reynolds, and Vera Schwarcz—offer a mix of hits and misses in achieving these goals. I will look at each contribution based on how well they (1) memorialize Klüger and (2) make a compelling argument, starting from the weakest. Reynold's chapter, which should be the most important for grappling with the question of Holocaust memory, disappoints in its argumentation. Propping up cultural critic Theodor Adorno as a straw man because of his famous declaration of poetry as barbaric after Auschwitz, Reynolds wants to argue for Holocaust memorial tourism and seems to know of Adorno for his critique of mass culture. I am unsure, as Reynolds never cites Adorno and refers to Adorno's position out of context, with a quote from Klüger on what [End Page 133] she viewed as an authoritarian perspective from Adorno as Reynolds's closest engagement with Adorno. Reynolds conflates Adorno's well-known critique of mass culture with his metacritique of cultural criticism itself and the malleability of total ideology to include criticism of total ideology within that ideology. This conflation glibly undermines his reading of Klüger to support Holocaust tourism. Gelber's contribution, built on a long-standing professional friendship with Klüger and an almost unrivaled knowledge of her writings, argues that she is a Zionist. For all the circumstantial evidence Gelber compiles, none of it is a direct statement from Klüger affirming this argument. Gelber openly admits to a degree of speculation and, when one considers Gelber's role as editor and that Klüger is no longer around to dispute his claim, the lack of a direct statement stands out like a sore thumb, weakening his position. Gliman's contribution does not so much advance an argument beyond "Names matter" (10) as provide us with a historical sketch of two Jewish Germanists in America. The chapter moves us through the significance of names and the magic behind them throughout various texts in a style expected from Gilman, as he also traces his professional friendship with Klüger. However, Gilman also rebukes Adorno out of context and, in the absence of a more specific argument to be made, the personal insights into Gilman and Klüger's professional friendship are the only silver lining. Comparative analyses by Tempian and Schwarcz offer readers fresh perspectives on Klüger and Holocaust writing. Tempian's chapter gives readers a comparative look at Holocaust children's poetry and, with Klüger's scholarly and personal perspectives in the background, shows readers that the children of the Holocaust processed and appreciated trauma of the Holocaust no differently than their adult counterparts. Schwarcz holds Klüger's poetry up against poems on ghosts and mourning in a way that shows some important transcendental qualities to Klüger's poetry, while still respecting historical specificities. Braese and Detering focus on closer readings of Klüger's language. Braese claims that the German weiter leben serves as a "Miteinandersprechen" (47), a settling of accounts. This is to say that writing weiter leben in German was not only to keep her mother from reading her...