Edgar Hilsenrath Research Articles

Post-Shoah Jewish Culture in Germany and Austria: An Introduction

This issue of The German Quarterly features articles that grew out of an international symposium entitled Politics, Memory and Representation. Post-Shoah Culture in German-speaking Countries, held at the University of Illinois at Chicago in November 1998. The purpose ofthe event was to bring together an interdisciplinary panel of experts from German Studies, Studies, History, Anthropology, Art, Political Science, and the Berlin community. As a result, diverse perspectives on the topic unfolded, as the volume at hand reveals. Since the early 1990s, increasing attention has been paid to identity after the Holocaust, a trend which is continuing into the 21st century. Thus, in January 2000 the Holocaust Memorial Museum of Washington, DC, sponsored a three-day conference entitled Life Reborn: Displaced Persons 1945-1951, which focused on the life of Holocaust survivors in DP (displaced persons) camps. In these holding places, people were re-establishing their lives and identities while waiting up to six years to leave for Palestine, the United States, and other countries. Of the 230,000 European Jews in approximately 90 camps in Germany and Austria, only very few remained in German-speaking countries-only approximately 15,000 persons had survived within Nazi Germany. By 1952, only 12,000 DPs had stayed, and by 1955 only 999. Although there was a general assumption that only the weakest among them remained in Germany,1 some survivors remained because they had managed to establish themselves in business, while others chose to live in Germany for idealistic or personal reasons. The poet Gerty Spies, for example, strongly identified with the German language and culture and wanted to reveal her experiences as a prisoner in Theresienstadt to her fellow citizens.2 Survivors who had left their former home countries began to look back to the past. The Vienna-born US scholar of German Studies Ruth Kluger did so in her 1992 autobiography weiter leben,3 in which she revived her life as a young girl in Vienna and her experiences in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, but her main focus was her experiences in Gottingen in the late 1980s as the director of the study abroad program at the University of California. Likewise, the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld focused on the time after the Holocaust in his 1992 book The Iron Tracks, a work that appeared in Germany in 1999, translated from Hebrew by Stefan Siebers.4 Appelfeld portrays the post-Shoah era through the eyes of a fictional character. He states, Das Material ist tatsachlich Material aus dem eigenen Leben.5 The remaining trauma and the wish for revenge, often absent in other works dealing with the same topic, are expressed in Applefeld's novel. Likewise, authors who returned from exile to live in Germany examined their post-Shoah experience in the 1990s, for example Edgar Hilsenrath in his autobiographical novel Die Abenteuer des Ruben Jablonski.6 The Chicago symposium included presentations from scholars concerning Holocaust survivors, such as the contribution of the political scientist Norma Moruzzi, whose intellectual and professional identity is strongly influenced by post-Holocaust questions, as demonstrated in her paper. Esther Parada, a Chicago-based artist and professor of photography, is aware that a displacement of her identity is characteristic of her art. During the general discussion concluding the symposium, she mentioned that she and her family had transferred their Jewish concern to concern for non-Jewish minorities. The communities in today's Germany and Austria are made up of formerly displaced persons who remained in Germany and Austria, their children, German- and Austrian-born Jews, and Jews who moved there subsequently. The younger members of this group express themselves in a manner distinct from the mainstream, having come to speak out on their life in Germany and their identity more directly than the previous generation. …

Transforming the Center, Eroding the Margins. Essays on Ethnic and Cultural Boundaries in German-Speaking Countries

Lorenz, Dagmar C.G., and Renate S. Posthofen, eds. the Center, Eroding the Margins. Essays on Ethnic and Cultural Boundaries in GermanSpeaking Countries. Columbia, SC: Camden House,1998. 324pp. $75.00 hardcover. To various degrees the volume is informed by the postmodern challenge of traditional notions such as margin and center, identity, otherness and self. More specifically, this compilation of twenty-one compact and often rather short articles examine[s] literature that deals with the experience of difference and its various expressions by Jewish, Arab, and women authors, German and Austrian writers who by all appearances are mainstream but nonetheless feel detached from or disenfranchised by the perceived centers of power(2). Based on the observation that problems of alterity and positionality are being revised in the most current literature but equally inform older texts, the selected contributions examine literary and cultural material from the last two centuries with an emphasis on material produced before, during, and after World War II. The first section focuses on the perceptions of alterity as an effect of exile, more specifically on gender-specific aspects of exile. While the first four articles are devoted to the work of Gertrud Kolmar, the last two contributions of fer more general observations on the female experience of exile. The second section, Transcending Ethnicity and Cultural Boundaries: History and Culture, offers studies of pre-- twentieth century literature, such as the work of Fanny Lewald, Alma Maximilian Karlin, and a comparison between Selig Paulus Cassel and Edith Stein. Also included are readings of Edgar Hilsenrath's work, and a portrait of the critics Alfred Kerr and Marcel Reich-Ranicki. The articles in the third section entitled Transforming the Center, Eroding the Margins, deal with constructions of identity in terms of nationality, ethnicity, and gender. Included are articles on multiculturalism and identity, strategies of Jewish counter-memory, the relationship between Jewish, Yiddish, and Ashkenazic Studies and Germanistik, the work of Robert Menasse, Iman Kahil, as well as trends in post-wall writing in Germany. The last section examines literary (re-)configuradons of tradition and innovation in the work of Tristan Tzars, Hugo Ball, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Torberg, Leo Perutz, Frank Zwillinger, and Nelly Sachs. Aside from the thematic foci, the contributions fall into five basic categories: (1) the epistemological re-evaluation of older works (Kolmar, Lewald, Kafka); (2) readings of post-modern narrative strategies (Hilsenrath, Menasse); (3) survey articles expanding the mainstream canon (exile literature by women, post-wall writing, German-Arab authors); (4) discussions of recent theoretical and disciplinary configurations (multiculturalism, counter-memory, Jewish Studies/Germanistik, formations of identity, the position of the literary critic), and (5) presentation of lesser known authors or works (Goll, Karlin, Cassel, Stein, Torberg, Perutz, Zwillinger, Sachs). …

Journey to Oblivion: The End of the East European Yiddish and German Worlds in the Mirror of Literature (review)

176 SHOFAR Winter 1993 Vol. 11, No. 2 Journey to Oblivion: The End of the East European Yiddish and German Worlds in the Mirror ofLiterature, by Peter Stenberg. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. 213 pp. $35.00. That East European Jewry was destroyed in the Nazi Holocaust continues to shame the historical consciousness of humankind. It is less known that in the wake of Hitler's war in the east many millions of ethnic Germans were brutally driven from their homes in the Baltics, Ukraine, Silesia, and Sudetenland, and perhaps more than a million of them were murdered by wrathful local populaces at the war's end. It is also true that after Auschwitz neither Germans nor Jews can contemplate their own history-the Germans in guilt, the Jews in mourning-without including the other in it. Yet in no way do these two people share the consciousness of a common, or parallel, "journey to oblivion" that the title of this study suggests. Whatever historical ties or events may be cited to link Germans and Jews, the enormity of the Holocaust negates their validity for the argument of comparable fates. The one people committed the crime, the other suffered it. Establishing a moral symmetry between the German and Jewish disasters, I should stress, is not Stenberg's aim. Throughout his book he takes pains to dispel any notion that the ethnic Germans of Eastern Europe, however dreadful their demise, experienced a tragedy approximate in horror to that of the Jews. Likewise he consistently cites the Nazi policy of brutal conquest as the catalyst for the German agony, just as he repeatedly names Hitler's hordes as the murderers of the Jews. Nonetheless , the discomfort created by the book's title extends to its organizing theme as well as its content, which this title does in fact describe. German and Jewish fates in Eastern Europe, the author contends, found meaningful counterparts in one another, and a comparative study of twentieth-century Yiddish and German literature, perforce in narrow selection, will better illuminate the fearful end of both peoples. To support this thesis, Stenberg, a Canadian Germanist, first surveys th·e evolvement ofYiddish from German, and then describes the migration ofJews and Germans to Eastern Europe, and their communities there. In Chapter 3 he draws on Sholom Aleichem's Tevye stories along with German novels of uprooting and assimilation by the Galician-born Jewish authors (of quite unequal rank) Karl Emil Franzos, Joseph Roth, and Alexander Granach to show how the erosion of traditional shtetl culture is reflected in both Yiddish and German literature. His witnesses to the Book Reviews 177 decline of Gennan life in Eastern Europe through the upheavals of World War I and the Russian Revolution (Chapter 4) are the Baltic-Gennan novelist Siegfried von Vegesack and a chronicler of the Mennonite community in Ukraine, Dietrich Neufeld. In Chapter 4, after a brief discussion ofl. B. Singer and the esthetic problems ofHolocaust literature, Stenberg examines novels of this genre by the Jewish Gennan-Ianguage writers Jurek Becker and Edgar Hilsenrath, and the lesser-known nonJewish author Udo Steinke. His last chapter treats the end of the Gennan presence in fonner East Prussia, as portrayed in novels by the prominent Gennan writers Johannes Bobrowski, Siegfried Lenz, Horst Bienek, and Christa Wolf. The book concludes with some observations on present-day Romanian-Gennan writing. Stenberg proceeds from the conviction that critical studies in English both on Holocaust literature and Yiddish literature, the latter with its themes of shtetl life and the move to the New World, have tended to remove their subjects from a broader literary context. Such studies, he suggests, could have been enriched had their authors examined works on the kindred theme of the Gennan ordeal in Eastern Europe, or works in languages other than Yiddish and English, i.e., in Gennan. But his own comparative study fails to exemplifY this point. Indeed, he might have more profitably applied his efforts solely to the East European Gennan theme. For where he does, he treats some truly neglected questions. Elsewhere, however, he has trod well-explored ground and in the process demanded more of his brief study than one...

Memories of the Holocaust Edgar Hilsenrath and the Fiction of Genocide

Literary attempts in German to describe the holocaust, dominated by feelings of guilt or moral outrage, have failed to make lasting impressions on the German public. This article attempts to show that the novels of Edgar Hilsenrath successfully break through into taboo areas by handling the holocaust with black humour and savage irony.