Holocaust Metatestimony: Towards a Definition

THE LATE WORKS OF TWO German-speaking Holocaust survivors, Edgar Hilsenrath's Berlin… Endstation (Berlin… End of the Line, 2006) and Ruth Klüger's unterwegs verloren (lost on the way, 2008) have been less celebrated than their earlier writings on the Holocaust, but have a particular importance as a belated form of what this essay terms “Holocaust metatestimony.” These two texts, one a fictionalized and one an autobiographical account of a survivor who tries to build a literary career in Germany following a period in exile, are exemplars of what Dorota Glowacka calls the “repetition compulsion” of survivor literature, and they are also texts documenting the process of narrating, writing, publishing and publicizing Holocaust testimony. Hence they can be read as testimonies to the very process of testifying, contributing to what I contend is a distinctive and important genre of testimonial with a disruptive political potential, at a crucial moment when scholarly concern is turning to the problematics that arise “after testimony” or in relation to the “future of testimony.”

These two very different texts share several political and aesthetic concerns that push the boundaries of convention in Holocaust testimonials, most particularly in the contemporary German context. Hilsenrath and Klüger transgress the boundaries of the period of persecution by speaking to the politics of the time in which they were written—the early years of the twenty-first century—rather than providing an encapsulated memoir of the period of persecution. Their uncomfortable narratives provide a crucial counterperspective to any claims that German literary culture has “normalized” its relationship to the Holocaust by an increased openness to testimony and to German Jewish literatures, or any claims that Germany is no longer an anti-Semitic country. Although 1989 and the memory debates of the 1990s appear as important caesuras in both texts, the shadow of the Holocaust is rendered more, not less, problematic by a changing cultural climate in the German-speaking world. Moreover, as Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland suggest in the introduction to their 2014 book The Future of Testimony, “it is time to map the affective, biographical, experiential and psychic forces at work when witnessing.”