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 farright organizations. Among these can be considered the rise of the farright Freiheitliche Partei Osterreichs (FPO, 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 farright terrorists throughout the lifetime of the Federal Republic, such as the murder of CDU politician Walter Lubcke 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. 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 uses, 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. Hence the Jewish writer Max Czollek has recently excoriated the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung as a German Gedächtnistheater (theater of memory), in which Jews have been required performatively to absolve Germans of their guilt by their presence and cultural participation in the Federal Republic and in the GDR.

The Czech-Austrian survivor H G. Adler (1910–1988) was to some extent a paradigm of the forgotten and neglected literary testifier of the Holocaust in the German language. Although a prolific polymath—novelist, lyricist, photographer, sociologist, theologian, cultural historian, among other fields—Adler's literary work received little recognition in West Germany or elsewhere during his lifetime or after his death. In this sense, Adler's battle to gain recognition for his literary work can be seen to parallel the German-language literary sphere's relationship to literature by Jewish people and by survivors in the early years following the Holocaust. Most notably, Heinrich Böll, in his Frankfurt Lectures of 1964, claimed that the very quality of Adler's work was responsible for its neglect by literary critics:

For Böll, Adler's lack of success was indicative of the wider crisis in West German society in the 1960s—its lack of a humane Heimat for the individual—which can be combatted through an ‘aesthetics of the humane’ exemplified by Adler's work. Böll makes of Adler a symbol of the ethical condition of German literature in particular, and the political condition of postwar West Germany in general.

Since the 1980s, hardly any book or article has been published about the scholar, poet and novelist that does not contain an analysis of Adler’s unjustly neglected status. The few early volumes that did engage with his work during Adler's lifetime, Buch der Freunde3 and Zu Hause im Exil4 repeatedly thematized Adler as the least known and most overlooked of writers.

Ruth Klüger's Lifetime of Interrogating the Taboo

Toward the end of weiter leben (1992), Ruth Kluger's groundbreaking feminist memoir of her “Holocaust girlhood remembered,” Kluger describes her first experience of publishing literary witness to the Holocaust. In the summer of 1945, while living as a displaced person in Germany, the thirteen-year-old Kluger sent the two poems that she had composed while in Auschwitz to a recently founded newspaper. Kluger had hoped to be taken seriously as an author of lyric poetry, written in German for a German audience. Instead, she found to her horror that the newspaper had only published two verses of her poems. These were framed with belittling copy and a sentimentalizing illustration:

In this book I have analyzed a disparate set of literary texts by four German-Jewish survivor-witnesses to the Holocaust. I have argued that they form a significant corpus that bears testimony to the neglected history of feeling in the postwar era, a history that runs counter to, and in tension with, German narratives of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. I noted that, despite the very different circumstances under which these survivors wrote their testimony, and the very different genres in which they wrote, certain themes and styles stand out, which I have termed characteristic of a “metatestimonial” mode of poetics. These may include an emotive writing style that not only archives negative feelings but also mobilizes them as an uncomfortable force for social critique. They also include transnational and cross-historical attempts to contextualize the writers’ experiences in the Holocaust, often written at a time when such comparisons were tabooed. They include attempts to connect to and continue traditions of narration that have been disrupted by the Holocaust, be that the modernism espoused by Adler, the attempts to connect to oral forms of Jewish ghetto narrative practiced by Wander and Hilsenrath, or the attempt to reanimate a lost tradition in Jewish and female writing in Kluger's work. And finally, they are marked with the traces of trauma, no matter how long after the painful events they are published. The texts are marked by a traumatic temporality, where the narrating survivor-subject is constantly returned to the time of persecution, leading to narratives that are non-linear, fragmented and at times incoherent. Hence, I argued, literary life writing after the Holocaust is always untimely. I have argued that this untimeliness demonstrates the facile nature of a linear narrative of Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

As I argued at the beginning of this book, the four survivor-authors did not view themselves as a cohort. As we have seen in the close readings of the texts, the biographies, poetics, politics, and reception of the four authors were also very different. It was not my intention in this text to blur the important distinctions between these four highly original writers, their very different transnational life trajectories, and their distinctive critiques of the continuities between Nazi past and postwar present.

Edgar Hilsenrath as Provocateur

A reputation of transgression and a mythology of censorship surrounded the German Holocaust survivor Edgar Hilsenrath,from the time when his first novel was published in Germany in the 1960s. Few studies of Hilsenrath's first two published novels of the Holocaust, Nacht (Night, first published 1964) and Der Nazi & der Friseur (1977; first published in English translation as The Nazi and the Barber in 1971) fail to mention briefly the difficulties that Hilsenrath had in getting these works published, facing opposition from his German publishers Kindler who feared they might be viewed as antisemitic. At the same time, recent work, including Patricia Vahsen's scrupulous reception history of Hilsenrath, also qualifies these claims. In this chapter, I examine the way in which Hilsenrath transformed the censorship myth surrounding his early literary testimonials into a subsequent series of semi-autobiographical novels about the aftermath of writing and testifying in the postwar years: Fuck America (first published 1980), Die Abenteuer des Ruben Jablonski (The Adventures of Ruben Jablonski, 1997), and Berlin… Endstation (Berlin… End of the Line, 2006). In addition I examine how Hilsenrath uses compulsive literary transgression as a technique for registering and resisting the aftermath of trauma and testimony. At the same time, Hilsenrath's literary transgressions frequently go beyond satire and provocation into dark celebrations of rape and sexual violence, working out complexes of rejection and the struggle for self-expression in a disturbingly traumatized way.

There is certainly evidence of suspicion and hostility towards Hilsenrath's literary production from various gatekeeping figures in the German literary field. Nacht, a novel about an unnamed ghetto, was initially suspect among German publishers for the unflinching way in which it portrayed the ruthless survival strategies that the Jewish inmates were forced into under inhumane conditions. His next novel, Der Nazi & der Friseur, a grotesque satire about a Nazi perpetrator who takes on the identity of one of his Jewish victims after World War II, has been described as pornographic for bringing the themes of sexuality and the Holocaust into contact, as well as inappropriate for using the voice of the perpetrator. Both novels were thus deemed to be excessive, disrupting German literary postwar consensuses of philosemitism and authenticity.

I open this chapter with a question raised by Austrian survivor Fred Wander (1917–2006) in both versions of his autobiography, the first published in 1996 as Das gute Leben: Erinnerungen (The Good Life: A Memoir), and the second, revised and with the longer title Das gute Leben oder Von der Fröhlichkeit im Schrecken (The Good Life or On Joy in Horror), published in 2006. This question underlies all literary testimony to the Holocaust. “A book about concentration camps? What use is that?” Wander's assertion that “they would always run up against this question” might seem to suggest that for writers of the Holocaust this question is in many ways ahistorical. Such a reading of Wander's question would seem to return the Holocaust to the realm of the metaphysical, a sacralized tragedy that raises existential, rather than political, questions. These questions preoccupied the Austrian-Jewish survivor Wander for his entire writing life, in multiple contexts. Wander was born as Fritz Rosenblatt in Austria in 1917, fled from the Anschluss to France in 1938, was captured and deported to Auschwitz and Buchenwald among many other camps, and subsequently chose to spend almost thirty years in the German Democratic Republic before returning to Austria in 1983 (DgLa, 99; DgLb, 127).

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.”

The act of bearing witness is ineluctably dependent on real places, real events, and the utterances of real people. As such it stands in tension with Aristotelian poetics, which suggests that poets should leave the stuff of actuality to the historiographers: “It is not the poet's function to relate actual events, but the kinds of things that might occur and are possible in terms of probability or necessity.” Whereas the historian relates actual events and focuses on “the particular,” poetry is “more philosophical” and “elevated” since it “relates more of the universal.” In the German context, this philosophically oriented approach to literature was given aesthetic underpinning in the Age of Idealism, which evolved the antirhetorical ideal of the “free,” autonomous literary work of art that is liberated from the lowly constraints of historical fact and moral argument. More than any other literary tradition, however, German literature has come under pressure from historical reality. The crimes perpetrated against the Jews under National Socialism have posed an ongoing challenge, demanding conceptualization, articulation, and engagement. German literature was automatically implicated because it depends on the language used to instigate, perpetrate, and conceal those crimes, and because German was the natural language of most of those who—in various roles—witnessed the crimes as participants.

Introduction

Two writers, born within 350 miles of each other, and yet worlds apart. Two writers, who would come to live, as exiles, within 100 miles of each other, work in the same academic field, share at least one important friend (Michael Hamburger) as well as an obsession with the Holocaust and its representation in literature and scholarship, and yet who never met or corresponded with one another. Two writers, the younger of whom not only read the other's works extensively but also placed him as a figure in his own text while openly using maps and figures from the elder writer's works, though the younger never wrote on or discussed the importance of the other writer in any article or interview. Finally, two writers, the older one having lived in almost complete obscurity despite publishing twenty-six books in his lifetime and several posthumous volumes since, while the younger rocketed to literary fame in middle age only to have his life end early in a terrible car crash—the elder writer having died peacefully in London years before at age seventy-eight despite having suffered the cataclysms of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Niederorschel, and Langenstein.