Combining cultural history and literary analysis, this study proposes a new and thought-provoking reading of the changing relationship between Germans and Jews following the Holocaust. Two Holocaust survivors whose work became uniquely successful in the Germany of the 1980s and 1990s, Grete Weil and Ruth Kluger, emerge as exemplary in their contributions to a postwar German discussion about the Nazi legacy that had largely excluded living Jews. While acknowledging that the German audience for the works of Holocaust survivors began to change in the 1980s, this study disputes the common tendency to interpret this as a sign of greater willingness to confront the Holocaust, arguing instead that it resulted from a continued German misreading of Jews' criticisms. By tracing the particular cultural-political impact that Weil's and Kluger's works had on their German audience, it investigates the paradox of Germany's confronting the Holocaust without necessarily confronting the Jews as Germans. Furthermore, for the authors this literature also had a psychological impact: their 'return' to the German language and to Germany is read not as an act of mourning or nostalgia, but rather as a public call to Germans for a dialogue about the Nazi past, as a way to move into the public realm the private emotional and psychological battles resulting from German Jews' exclusion from and persecution by their own national community.

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About the author

PASCALE BOS is Assistant Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas - Austin, USA.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title: German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust
Book Subtitle: Grete Weil, Ruth Kluger and the Politics of Address
Authors: Pascale R. Bos
Series Title: Studies in European Culture and History
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403979339
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan New York
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts Collection, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc. 2005
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4039-6657-5Published: 15 June 2005
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-52963-6Published: 30 December 2015
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4039-7933-9Published: 03 June 2005
Series ISSN: 2945-6274
Series E-ISSN: 2945-6282
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIV, 143
Topics: Twentieth-Century Literature, Modern History, European History, History of World War II and the Holocaust, Jewish Cultural Studies, Fiction

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Table of contents (5 chapters)

Front Matter

Introduction

The Jewish Return to Germany

Mythical Interventions

Creating Address

Belated Interventions

Back Matter

About this book