Pascale R. Bos. German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust: Grete Weil, Ruth Klüger and the Politics of Address. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. xiv + 143 pp. $69.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4039-6657-5.

Reviewed by Joanne Sayner (Department of German Studies, Birmingham University)
Published on H-German (March, 2007)

Creating Address

In her preface, Pascale Bos makes it clear that this text is not only an academic work, but also part of her personal history. The many questions she asks about how and why survivors of the Holocaust wrote and what impact their literature has had clearly hold continuing relevance for her. As one reads the many questions she poses in the preface, one cannot help but think that this study will be incapable of answering them all and the author herself readily acknowledges this problem. Instead, her study represents a continuing search for answers about how the texts of two survivors, Grete Weil and Ruth Klüger, fit into and contribute to a cultural history of memories of National Socialism. Her study looks at the texts within the intersections of feminist studies, Holocaust studies and German literary studies and considers when and how the texts were produced, published and reviewed.

Grete Weil, born in 1906, survived exile in Amsterdam after fleeing the Nazis with her husband. Her husband was arrested and murdered in Mauthausen. She returned to western Germany in 1947 and died in 1999. Ruth Klüger was born in 1931 and lived in Vienna. She survived deportation to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz with her mother. After the war, they emigrated to the United States. Bos focuses predominantly on eight texts, the first seven by Weil and the last by Klüger: Ans Ende der Welt (1949); Happy, sagte der Onkel (1968); Tramhalte Beethovenstraat (1963); Meine Schwester Antigone (1980); Generationen (1983); Der Brautpreis (1988); Spätfolgen (1992); weiter leben: Eine Jugend (1992). Her aim is to bring both the texts and their interpretation to an English-speaking audience. These texts have, she argues, been under-explored to date. As many of the texts have been translated into English and Bos provides useful summaries of plots and translations of all quotations from both primary and secondary literature, her study no doubt helps to broaden the appeal of these works.[1] She provides a useful grounding for students who often struggle with these challenging but rewarding texts.

Bos begins her text with a comprehensive introduction that highlights some of the key issues that must be considered when approaching the writings of these two women: questions about the existence of a German-Jewish symbiosis, definitions of trauma, the validity of feminist approaches and the possibility and difficulty of representation in Holocaust literature. These overviews and attendant bibliographical references provide a helpful orientation within the debates, both for those less familiar with the terrain and for those who want to be reminded why the issues are important. In addition, Bos reminds us of another important consideration: notwithstanding contemporary postmodern emphasis on the text rather than the author, a delicate balance must be maintained between focusing on the texts of the two women while remembering that their very physicality, that is, the fact of the authors' survival, is of importance both for them as witnesses to the horror and as women writers arguably attempting to reassert a sense of identity.

Bos examines texts produced by Weil and Klüger between 1949 and 1992 in order to highlight patterns within (predominantly West) German cultural history. She argues that the texts published in the 1980s and 1990s are paradigmatic of a change in the literary scene that began in the late 1970s, as demonstrated by their "unprecedented large German audience and critical response" (p. 5). Within a broader context more favorable to German-Jewish literature, Bos maintains that these texts are significant because they were written by those who experienced Nazism first hand, and also because "they rise above the documentary impulse of the eyewitness testimony" (p. 4), that is, they demonstrate a "self-awareness" (p. 4) and take as their themes the very memories they are describing. Bos reads these texts firstly as "attempts at overcoming ... reification that led to estrangement from the self" (p. 7), and, secondly, as "products of a specific political and cultural discourse" (p. 7). She questions to what extent these texts mark a "return," through Weil's and Klüger's textual address, to their German audience.

The chapters progress chronologically, with chapter 2 considering Weil's texts from 1949, 1963 and 1968; chapter 3 her writings from the 1980s; and chapter 4 Klüger's text from 1992. Chapter 5 concludes the volume, briefly looking at the two authors comparatively. The strengths of the study lie in the close readings of these intricate confrontations with the past and the way the texts are traced through the shifting cultures of remembering.

While it often seems pernicious for reviews to focus on what a text does not do, rather than what it does, Bos's argument could have benefited from further consideration of Weil's autobiography, Leb ich denn, wenn andere leben (1998). Given that Bos does briefly mention this text (pp. 21, 69), the lack of discussion does not seem to be the result of the inevitable time lag between Bos's writing of the study and its publication. For me, an examination of the autobiography could have proved relevant for several reasons. First, it would have supplemented the discussion of Klüger's text as an example of German-Jewish writing after reunification which, Bos argues, was unproblematically absorbed into a cultural context that aimed to promote normalization. Klüger, Bos maintains, was read as having "arrived" following her "return" to Germany in the 1990s.

Second, Bos states that she is focusing on the texts under discussion as they represent the "exact opposite of the silence in the family and culture in which [she] grew up" (p. xii). This notion of a "silence" or "amnesia" is also found in the sections on cultural history that accompany the textual analysis. While the publication histories of Weil's earlier texts do indeed suggest a marginalization of her memories and I would agree with Bos's analysis of the political trends at the time, Weil's autobiography of 1998 explicitly reminds us that some Jewish memories did became prominent in the 1950s in West Germany. Weil refers, as does Bos herself, to Anne Frank: "Ich ahne natürlich nicht, wie weltweit bekannt dieser Name bald sein wird" (p. 240).[2] As Robert Moeller has emphasized: "remembering selectively is not the same as forgetting," indicating how careful we need to be with phrases like "the cultural climate of silence reigning in 1950s West Germany," (p. 32) which underplay the complexity of the politics of remembering at that time.[3]

Third, the autobiography maybe raises, more explicitly than Weil's other texts, the issue of genre, including as it does a letter to Margarete Susman, a play (Weihnachtslegende 1943) and forty-one short chapters of prose. Bos refers to both the letter and play with respect to earlier contexts but does not examine the possible reasons for their republication in 1998. Questions of genre could, I feel, have been addressed more directly throughout, given that both Weil and Klüger take as a theme the challenges of autobiographical writing and Klüger elsewhere addresses the issue of autobiographical writing in the postmodern age.[4] Bos does deal with Weil's choice of genre in terms of address in relation to Tramhalte Beethovenstraat, the choice of a fictional young, male German protagonist, and in Meine Schwester Antigone, the inclusion of documentary testimony by a solider, so it seems to me integral to the argument, especially about the success of her appeal to her German audience, to consider what Weil said about writing her autobiography: "Vielleicht habe ich ... das Gefühl, dass ich gewisse Dinge aus meinem Leben in meinen anderen Werken noch nicht klar genug gesagt habe."[5] This explicit dialogical intent is after all at the heart of Bos's argument. An examination of Weil's text from 1998 also challenges Bos's claims that Klüger's text is highly unusual both by virtue of its self-conscious nature and the "late date of its creation" (p. 80).

Fourth, Bos highlights that Weil was often disappointed by the reception of her texts, but mentions only of the autobiography that "it was reviewed favorably" (p. 69). Bos's analysis of the reception in general could have been supplemented by quotations from the reviews and reference to them in the bibliography. I would have liked to engage more fully with her claim that "the audience responded in a way that left these memories as firmly rooted in the past only, rather than seeing them as revealing something about the present" (p. 70). As argued elsewhere, a persistent characteristic of the reviews of Weil's writing is that they continually position her as an outsider. They repeatedly expressed surprise at her decision to return to Germany in 1947, which persists into and beyond 1998, and continued to undermine her right to belong.[6] In contrast, Bos refers to Stephan Braese and Holger Gehle's "comprehensive analysis of the reception" (p. 79) of Klüger's text, reception that instead positioned her within a discourse of a returning German identity, thus displacing questions of Otherness. Bos states that she wants to focus on the texts rather than the reception, but the very nature of her project, the politics of address, surely implies an attendant focus on the addressee.

Bos's study highlights the many similarities between the approaches and agendas of Weil and Klüger. It could also, however, have mentioned one of the significant differences between them, a difference problematized by Weil herself: she could never bear witness to the horrors of the concentration camps. In 1992, in the same year that Klüger's text was published, Weil wrote: "Über vierzig Jahre lang habe ich mir eingebildet, ein Zeuge zu sein, und das hat mich befähigt, so zu leben wie ich es getan habe. Ich bin kein Zeuge mehr. Ich habe nichts gewußt. Wenn ich Primo Levi lese, weiß ich, daß ich mir ein KZ nicht wirklich vorstellen konnte. Meine Phantasie war nicht krank genug."[7]

Bos's text is a useful and interesting study that will certainly help make these authors' works more accessible to a wider audience. The importance of feminist analysis of texts such as these is worth stressing and her work shows how the intersections of literary analysis and cultural studies can prove fruitful. At times I found myself wanting to learn more and I think that particularly in the case of Grete Weil, still more remains to be said on these important and provocative texts.

Notes

[1]. Grete Weil, The Brideprice, tr. John Barrett (Boston: David R. Godine Publishers, 1991); Grete Weil, Last Trolley from Beethovenstraat, tr. John Barrett (Boston: David R. Godine Publishers, 1992); Grete Weil, My Sister, My Antigone tr. Krishna Winston (New York: Avon Books, 1984); Ruth Klüger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York: The Feminist Press, 2001).

[2]. Grete Weil, Leb' ich denn, wenn andere leben (Zurich: Nagel and Kimche, 1998), p. 240.

[3]. Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 16.

[4]. Ruth Klüger, "Zum Wahrheitsbegriff in der Autobiographie," in Autobiographien von Frauen. Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte, ed. Magdalene Heuser (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1996), pp. 405-410.

[5]. Carmen Giese, Das Ich im literarischen Werk von Grete Weil und Klaus Mann. Zwei autobiographische Gesamtkonzepte (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1997), p. 212.

[6]. Franziska Meyer, "Vom 'Ende der Welt': Grete Weils Rückkehr zu deutschen Lesern," in Erfahrung nach dem Krieg: Autorinnen im Literaturbetrieb 1945-1950. BRD, DDR, Österreich, Schweiz, ed. Christiane Caemmerer et al. (New York: Lang, 2002), pp. 37-55.

[7]. Joanne Sayner, "Eine Existenz aus Erinnerung. Grete Weils Leb ich denn, wenn andere leben," in Zwischen Trivialität und Postmoderne. Literatur von Frauen in den 90er Jahren, ed. Ilse Nagelschmidt, Alexandra Hanke, Lea Müller-Dannhausen and Melani Schröter (Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 2002), pp. 95-112.

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Citation: Joanne Sayner. Review of Bos, Pascale R., German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust: Grete Weil, Ruth Klüger and the Politics of Address. H-German, H-Net Reviews. March, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12981

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