THE FIRST PAGE
German-Jewish Life Writing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust
Beyond Testimony
by Helen Finch
22 April 2024
The First Page presents the first page of books that are launched as part of the IAS Book Launch Programme. On 25 April 2024, Helen Finch, Professor of German Literature at the University of Leeds, launched her new book German-Jewish Life Writing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust. In her monograph she sheds light on the question of how German-speaking Holocaust survivors pursued literary careers in an often-indifferent postwar society and focuses on four authors who bore literary witness to the Shoah – H. G. Adler, Fred Wander, Edgar Hilsenrath, and Ruth Klüger. She analyses their autofictional, critical, and autobiographical works written between the early 1950s and 2015, which depict their postwar experiences of writing, publishing, and publicising Holocaust testimony.
THE SUCCESS OF the German and Austrian projects of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) has always been subject to questioning. In the English-language media, historians seeking a way to confront unacknowledged crimes of the British empire, or to engage with Civil War memorials of Confederate generals in the US, have recently turned to Germany as a model of successful engagement with a difficult past. At the same time, critique from within Germany and Austria, as well as the German Studies academic community, has become louder. Doubt about the genuine success of Vergangenheitsbewältigung has been compounded by revelations about far-right violence and the complicity of German and Austrian state structures in facilitating far-right organizations. Among these can be considered the rise of the far-right Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ, Freedom Party of Austria) in Austria in the 1990s, German police liability in failing to stop the terrorist murders of the National Socialist Underground in the 2000s, the rise of the extreme far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany) in the 2010s, and the regular murders perpetrated by far-right terrorists throughout the lifetime of the Federal Republic, such as the murder of CDU politician Walter Lübcke in 2019, or the massacre of eleven people in Hanau in 2020.
Mary Fulbrook, in her recent study Reckonings, has pointed out that a failure to hold those accountable for crimes against humanity during the Nazi period lies at the root of the ongoing crisis of Vergangenheitsbewältigung [Mary Fulbrook, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice, Oxford University Press, 2018). Possibly because of this failure, German Vergangenheitsbewältigung has been as much a cultural and literary project as it has been a financial and political one. Fulbrook contends that although “cultural representations, political use, and public controversies have received a great deal of attention in historical accounts of ‘coming to terms with the past,’” the psychological implications of this past for individuals and their families have found less attention. It should be added here that this cultural project has also more often focused on the culture and politics of the German successor nations than on that of the victims. [Fulbrook: Reckonings, 538] Hence the Jewish writer Max Czollek has recently excoriated the process…
HELEN FINCH is Professor of German Literature at the University of Leeds. Her main areas of research are in the representation of the Holocaust in German-language literature, queer identity and memory in German culture, and curriculum design. Linking all three is a concern with marginalised voices, poetics of resistance, and inclusivity, concerns which she also brings to her teaching. Helen is Director of German at Leeds, and a member of the University’s Centre for Jewish Studies and the Centre for World Literatures.
The joint book launch – with Anna Koch, Lecturer in Modern German History at University College London, launching her book Home after Fascism – took place on 25 April 2024 at the Institute of Advanced Studies. More information.
Lead Image: Detail of book cover: German-Jewish Life Writing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust: Beyond Testimony by Helen Finch (Camden House, 2023)
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